The Association of Print Scholars is pleased to award its sixth annual Publication Grant to Kirsty Sinclair Dootson. The grant, in the amount of $1,000 supported by C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank, will support her forthcoming book, The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality, and British Modernity (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press).

The book presents “a dazzling history of chromatic media technologies, from Victorian printing to color television, that reveals how Britain modernized color and how color, in turn, modernized Britain.” Dootson proposes that “this revolutionary history brings to light how new color technologies informed ideas about national identity during a period of profound social change, when the challenges of industrialization, decolonization of the Empire, and evolving attitudes to race and gender reshaped the nation.” The book’s second chapter “offers the first account of how the new technology of chromolithography changed the way racial difference materialized in print.” Funding supplied by the APS Publication Grant will assist with the cost of image rights for the book. 

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. Her work explores the relationship between materials, technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies. She received her PhD in Art History with Film Studies from Yale University in 2018 and subsequently held a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge University.

This year’s jurors also awarded two Honorable Mention awards of $500 each to Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof for their publication Booksellers and the Burgeoning European Print Trade: The Plantin-Moreau Press of Antwerp and its Networks (ca. 1555-1641) (Brepols Publishers) and to Susan Dackerman for Dürer’s Knots: Early Modern Print and the Islamic East (Princeton University Press). 

Karen L. Bowen is an art historian, who specializes in the study of prints, printmaking, and book illustration in the early modern period. She works part-time as an instructor in printmaking techniques and the printing of texts in the hand-press period. In her research, she focuses on the production of illustrated editions at the Plantin-Moretus Press, the activities of artists engaged by that Press, and the involvement of booksellers in the European print trade. Her book, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in Sixteenth-Century Europe (CUP: 2008), co-written with Dirk Imhof, was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Book Prize in art history. Until May 2022, Dirk Imhof was keeper of the rare books and archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. He has a master’s degree in classics and earned a doctorate in history at the University of Antwerp in 2008 with a thesis on the Antwerp publisher Jan Moretus I. His recent publications include a bibliography of the editions by Jan Moretus I (2014) and Christophe Plantin’s Correspondence. Perspectives on Life and Work as a Publisher in 16th-century Europe (2020).

Susan Dackerman is a curator and scholar who has held posts at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Harvard Art Museums, Getty Research Institute, and Stanford University. She has organized numerous exhibitions, including Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color; Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe; and Corita Kent and The Language of Pop, and co-authored the catalogue raisonné of Jasper Johns monotypes, with Jennifer Roberts. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is working on a book about Albrecht Dürer’s prints and the Islamic East.

The $2,000 Publication Grant is funded by the Association of Print Scholars and through the generosity of C.G. Boerner and Harris Schrank, whom APS thanks for their continued support of the organization and its mission.

APS would like to thank Nancy Burns, Stoddard Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the Worcester Art Museum; Im Chan, Paper Conservator, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; and Helena Wright, Curator Emerita of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, for their diligence and generosity in reading the submissions. 

To learn more about the APS Publication Grant online, click here. 

Please contact grants@printscholars.org with any questions regarding this announcement.

DOOTSON IMAGE CAPTION INFO: 

“Spectrum Analysis of White Light,” The British Lithographer, vol. 2, no. 11 (June-July, 1893).