Academic Partnerships
The Phillips Collection partners with universities across the country to transform scholarship and innovation in the arts.
University of Virginia
The Phillips Collection’s new academic partnership with the University Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville, Virginia, is slated to begin in fall 2023. The partnership will provide rich and meaningful opportunities in education, innovation and research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and diversity and inclusion initiatives—all hallmarks of each institutions’ mission.
The collaboration between the museum and university will start with two main programs:
- An annual Predoctoral Fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Art History that will support graduate-level, interdisciplinary research in American, European, or non-Western art and art history from approximately the 1750s to the present. Proposals will focus on a commitment to social justice and an engagement with postcolonial and diasporic studies. The fellows in art history and archeology will perform independent scholarly work that broadens and diversifies their conducted research. They will work at the Phillips, allowing them to benefit fully from museum resources—including the library and archives and the permanent collection—furthering their dissertation research more deeply. Each fellow will present one public lecture, meet with Phillips colleagues, and participate in cross-departmental meetings, programs, and events. The Phillips Collection and UVA will select fellows according to the Phillips’s DEAI strategic goals of fostering a professional and scholarly community that reflects the diversity of today’s society.
- A Summer Undergraduate Internship that will run for an eight week-period and will be open to art history students from UVA who are interested in the museum cross-departmental experience, gaining firsthand exposure to arts and nonprofit administration.
Previous Partnerships
University of Maryland
From 2015-2021, The Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland joined forces, creating a dynamic partnership between America’s first museum of modern art and one of the country’s leading academic institutions for research and innovation. With this partnership, the Phillips and UMD made a fundamental commitment to promote the best of both institutions, to offer UMD an arts home in the nation’s capital, and to collaboratively invest in the continuous growth of UMD’s excellent STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) programming. UMD students and staff brought energy and scholarship to Northwest Washington, and students on campus benefited tremendously from Phillips resources in myriad ways such as joint teaching, research, and cultural activities; mobility of faculty, scholars, and students between institutions; and the creation and sharing of educational materials and resources across disciplines.
