• FDI Fellowship Program
• Apply for the FDI Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
• Apply for the FDI Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship
• Current Fellows
• FDI Fellows

Current Fellows at the FDI

Predoctoral Fellow 2011-2012

Edward Puchner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington. His dissertation is entitled “‘speaking His mind in my mind’: African American Art, the Evangelical Church, and the Art of Theodicy.” It discusses five artists – William Edmondson, Horace Pippin, Bill Traylor, Elijah Pierce and Minnie Evans – who lived, worshipped and created art within small evangelical church communities throughout the United States and used their artistry to engage early efforts to fight for the civil rights of African Americans. His thesis asks questions about their faith, their divine inspiration and the religious imagery within their work. In addition, it illustrates how their faith and imagery align with ideas within the African American evangelical church concerning race, divine justice, and human suffering. His project examines these vital aspects of the church’s theological discourse to understand how evangelicalism refigured racial violence and fashioned a “religioracial identity” for African Americans in the early twentieth century. His research interests include African American art, American modernism, contemporary art, folk/self-taught/outsider art, and the material culture of American religions.

Edward received his MA in Art History from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his BA in Art History from Carleton College. He is the recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship in American Art from the Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and a Barra Foundation Fellowship from the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Edward has also worked at the Indiana University Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and curated an exhibition on Indiana folk art for a non-profit organization in Bloomington, Indiana. He has contributed articles and reviews to Raw Vision magazine and other publications and presented papers for the Association of Historians of American Art, the American Studies Association, and the Southeastern College Art Conference.

Postdoctoral Fellow 2011-12

Takkara Brunson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African & African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Ph.D. in History in 2011. She specializes in modern Latin American history with a particular focus on race and gender, citizenship, and national identity. Her dissertation examines Cuban nation formation from the standpoint of Afro-Cuban women during the Republican Era (1902-1958). During the fellowship year, she will revise her dissertation into a book manuscript and complete articles on Afro-Cubans’ use of photography and Afro-Cuban feminism. Her research interests include: Latin American history, feminist theory and gender studies, critical race theory, African Diaspora studies, and visual culture studies.

She will teach a course, titled “The History of the African Diaspora in Latin America” in Spring 2012.