Catherine Clark receives Mellon Fellowship for 2017-18

"Images continue to construct understandings of other places and peoples and, in turn, our own place in the world. Fake news, after all, is often visual news."

— Catherine Clark, Assistant Professor of French Studies

21 April 2017

Catherine Clark, Assistant Professor of French Studies and Class of 1947 Career Development Professor, in the Global Studies and Languages Section, has received a Mellon Fellowship for 2017–2018, from the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), in Princeton, New Jersey. The fellowship, given to up to three scholars each year, grants a year membership in the IAS to engage in scholarly research and writing.

Clark's promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor without tenure will be effective July 1, 2017. She will be working on her second book project about the French fascination with the People's Republic of China after 1949.

In her first book, Paris and the Cliché of History (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), Clark explored "how photography became a way of accessing the past in archives, illustrated books, exhibitions, and amateur photo contests." Her new project is tentatively titled Seeing Red: France and the People's Republic of China 1949–2005. In this book, Clark expands the scope of her research to examine both film and material culture, as well as new geographic contexts.

"I am excited to work on the project," says Clark, who is "motivated by how these cultural questions still matter today." According to Clark, the People's Republic of China evokes "both promise and danger in the popular imagination, in France and in the United States." Clark aims to show how "Images continue to construct understandings of other places and peoples and, in turn, our own place in the world. Fake news, after all, is often visual news."

Catherine Clark | Global Studies and Languages

MIT Global Studies & Languages

MIT SHASS Communications
Photocredit: Jon Sachs, MIT SHASS Communications