Joshua Cohen, CCNY art history professor and 2022-2023 Schomburg Scholar-in-Residence Fellow. Photo credit: Lyan'lex Bernales.
Joshua I. Cohen, assistant professor of art history, at The City College of New York, is the recipient of a fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He joins 12 exceptionally talented academics, creative writers, and independent scholars as 2022-2023 Fellows in Schomburg’s acclaimed Scholars-in-Residence Program.
“Despite the challenges of the past two years, the Schomburg has persevered in maintaining its support for its flagship residential research program,” said Brent Hayes Edwards, the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program and the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. “We are proud to be able to offer the intellectual sanctuary and archival resources of the Center to yet another class of Fellows.”
During the 2022-23 term, which runs from September to July, Cohen and the other Scholars-in-Residence Fellows will have access to the renowned research collections and resources of the Schomburg, the pre-eminent repository for materials related to the history and cultures of peoples of African descent, with the expert assistance of its curatorial and reference staff. Scholars-in-Residence Fellows receive a stipend and the use of a private office in the Scholars Center, located at the heart of the Schomburg Center.
Cohen’s research is for a book entitled: “Art of the Opaque: African Modernisms, Decolonization, and the Cold War.”
He’ll examine African modernisms (c 1940-1990) in relation to troubling dimensions of decolonization that seldom surface in art scholarship. Whereas liberation narratives have rightly underlain most previous accounts of African modernism, the book investigates, without indulging in Afro pessimism, how Cold War politics drew African artists into a succeeding imperial age.
The book’s four main chapters—on South African painter Gerard Sekoto, Guinean polymath Fodeba Keita, major independence-era festivals, and the Ivorian Vohou-Vohou painters—seek to sensitively locate African modernists’ extraordinary work within decolonization’s tumultuous histories, lest their output appear too straightforwardly emblematic of an independence that in fact never fully arrived.
About the Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program
Since its establishment in 1983, the Schomburg Scholars-in-Residence Program has supported more than 248 scholars and writers, cementing its reputation as the premier residential research fellowship in the country for the fields of African American, African Diaspora, and African studies. Click here for more information about the Scholars-in-Residence Program.
About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Jay Mwamba
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jmwamba@ccny.cuny.edu