Awards back Garelick’s research of French drama, commercial fashion

Rhonda Garelick

Rhonda Garelick, associate professor of French, has received four fellowships that will allow her to take a two-year sabbatical to pursue research for her third book.

Garelick was one of 186 artists, scholars and scientists chosen from 3,000 applicants to receive a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for support of her upcoming book, Antigone in Vogue: The Theatrical Work of Coco Chanel.

Garelick’s scholarly interests include drama, popular culture, American television and the history of fashion. Her new book will explore Chanel’s costumes for modernist French theater and ballet.

In addition to receiving the Guggenheim fellowship, Garelick is one of two annual recipients of a Dedalus Foundation Senior Fellowship. She also was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a nonprofit federation of 68 national scholarly organizations. And Garelick was chosen to be a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles next fall. While there she will research neoclassical modern drama in France and its relationship to commercial fashion.

The Dedalus Foundation is a New York-based organization founded by the late painter Robert Motherwell to support work in modernism.

Each year the Getty Research Institute accepts applications from established scholars working on projects related to a specific theme, which for the 2005-06 academic year is “Duration: the Persistance of Antiquity.” Garelick will have access to the Getty collections, join colleagues in a weekly meeting devoted to the annual theme and participate in the intellectual life of the Getty Center.

Garelick’s first book, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siecle (1998), locates the roots of contemporary American media culture in the 19th-century dandyist movement. Her second book, Electric Salome (forthcoming, 2005), is a study of the modern dancer and early filmmaker Loie Fuller.

She also contributed an essay to the catalogue for the Chanel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit opens in May.

Garelick, who has taught at Connecticut College since 1998, said she will miss the day-to-day interaction with her students while she is on sabbatical, but looks forward to the scholarly gains her research will bring.

“This opportunity will bring something to the College,” she said, “and enhance my teaching.”

Visit Rhonda Garelick’s faculty profile.