Dr. Nancy L. Wicker, Professor of Art History at The University of Mississippi, has been awarded a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) of the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the academic year 2023–2024, where she will spend a sabbatical year carrying out research. The IRH, founded in 1959, was the first institute in North America attached to a university and devoted solely to the support and encouragement of scholarship and to the creation of a community of resident and visiting fellows in the humanities. The IRH is a member of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Research University Consortium.
Fellowships at the IRH are open to applicants in any discipline or field whose research has clear significance for the humanities, and Solmsen Fellowships are awarded only to external applicants for projects on pre-1700 Europe. The four Solmsen Fellows chosen for the coming year are among a total of thirty-nine internal and external scholars awarded stipendiary and non-stipendiary fellowships at the IRH.
Professor Wicker will spend the academic year writing a book on “Art Before and During the Viking Age and Beyond.” She will make extensive use of the UW-Madison Libraries, a world-class library system with special strengths in Scandinavian languages, literature, history, and archaeology.
Dr. Matthew L. Murray, Instructional Professor in The University of Mississippi’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology, is also among the thirty-nine scholars who will be at IHR during the coming year. He has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the IRH and will be working on a project on Archaeological Landscapes of Central Europe.