(New York, June 9, 2026)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, a leading research organization dedicated exclusively to the study of modernism and its global and historical contexts and impacts, announced its 2026–2027 Fellowships.
Since its founding in April 2013, the Research Center has awarded fellowships to thirty-five scholars. This year’s cohort includes the inaugural Non-Residential Doctoral Dissertation Completion Fellowship which provides support for students during the important final stage of writing and submitting their Ph.D. thesis.
The 2026-2027 fellowships are:
- Emily Madrigal (Ph.D. candidate, University of Virginia) has been selected for a two-year pre-doctoral fellowship to work on her dissertation, “Carving Pictures, Casting Color, and Painting with Glass: Sculpting in the Age of Statuemania”, examining sculptural practices in late nineteenth-century France that used the ephemera, byproducts, and castoffs of industry, such as textile waste (wool flock), glass bottle shards (pâte de verre), and artificial snow (refrigerators’ frost).
- Wei (Maggie) Wu (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego) has been awarded a two-year post-doctoral fellowship. She will work on her first book project, which examines how the Modern Prints Society, a group of Chinese woodcut artists, developed a distinctive vision of the woodcut as a modern medium through their engagement with its material properties and navigation of various transregional and transnational networks.
- Aaron Richmond (Ph.D. McGill University) has been awarded a one-year post-doctoral fellowship, to work on his first book project, “Laboratory of Letters: Scientific Aesthetics and the Making of the Modern Subject”, to be published by Northwestern University Press in 2028. The book revisits the modernist periodical L’Esprit nouveau (1920-1925) and its promises to remake art and architecture in service to a healthier life.
- Michelle Foa (Associate Professor, Tulane University) has been awarded a one-year mid-career fellowship to complete her book “Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art”, which is under contract with Yale University Press. The book argues that the artist’s commitment to material and technical experimentation is fundamental to his practice and is deeply intertwined with his subject matter.
- Rachel Denniston (Ph.D. candidate The Courtauld Institute of Art) has been awarded the inaugural non-residential doctoral dissertation completion fellowship to finish her dissertation, “Curating as World Building: Women, Occulture, and Wholeness in the ‘Anti-Museum’, 1920-60” examining the work of four female curators who worked in the USA, and aiming to rethink agency in the design of spaces and experiences which mediate the perception of art in the public sphere.
“Now in its tenth cycle of the program, the Research Center celebrates over a decade of fostering leading academic talent from around the world,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “We are thrilled to continue and expand this program which furthers The Met’s standing as a leading repository for the study of modern art and extends Leonard Lauder’s contributions beyond his lifetime in such a meaningful way.”
Neil Cox, the Head of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art: “The five new fellows extend the range of ideas in new historical and cultural directions, including everything from extraordinary sculptural approaches in nineteenth-century France to Chinese modern art, to ideas of the spiritual and the occult among women curators in New York. Projects on Degas and L’Esprit nouveau rethink more familiar areas of modern art using new methods and fresh archival discoveries. We look forward to an exciting year.”
About the Research Center
Founded in April 2013, The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art is a leading center for scholarship on modern art, including a focus on Cubism and its legacies. The first such institution dedicated exclusively to the study of modernism within an encyclopedic museum, the Research Center makes critical contributions to scholarship through its robust program of exhibitions, lectures, publications, research projects, and workshops. The scope of the Research Center’s activities can be found at on The Met’s website.
Each year, the Research Center awards Leonard A. Lauder Fellowships for pre- and post-doctoral candidates and one senior fellowship. Including the cohort announced today, so far thirty-five fellows have benefited from Center support. Recent awards have included projects on Ciphers and abstraction, Photography in Central Asia, Modern Art and Trademarks, Craft in the Paris Commune, and Black Artists in Brazil post-1945. The institution also hosts invited residencies of distinguished scholars of modern art, who pursue their own studies while participating in the activities of the Research Center. Previous fellows now have permanent teaching posts at Hunter College, the Universities of Calgary, Connecticut, Warwick (UK), Seoul (South Korea), Syracuse, Turin (Italy). Others have secured curatorial and research assistant positions in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. Alumni of the Research Center have published some twenty books and exhibition catalogues, as well as many journal articles and essays, and curated exhibitions in New York, Paris, and San Francisco.
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June 9, 2026