WM Professor Wins Guggenheim Fellowship

By Amber Lester Kennedy Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Susan Verdi Webster

Susan Verdi Webster, the Jane Williams Mahoney Professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, has been awarded the 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in fine arts research. It was one of just two awards given by the foundation for arts research this year.

The Guggenheim Fellowship awards grants to mid-career men and women who have demonstrated “exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” In total, 180 fellowships were awarded this year, selected from almost 3,000 applicants from the U.S. and Canada.

By winning the fellowship, Webster not only joins the ranks of the best scholars and artists in the country, but follows in family footsteps. Her father, the late Grady Webster, received a 1964 Guggenheim Fellowship in Plant Sciences while teaching at Purdue University. Only two other father-daughter pairs have won the award.

Webster will use her Fellowship to continue her research and writing, titled, “The conquest of European architecture: Andean masters and the construction of colonial Quito.” She is a leading scholar in the art of post-colonial Latin America, focusing primarily on the indigenous artists, builders and artisans who created Quito, Ecuador. Quito’s historic centre was declared a World Heritage Site due to its preservation since its construction.

Webster is a former Fulbright Fellow who is regarded internationally as an expert in confraternities – pious groups of laypersons – and their art patronage in Spain and Latin America. She’s the sixth William and Mary professor to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship. Former recipients include Sean Keilen (English, 2008); Nikos Chrisochoides (Computer Science, 2007); Barbara King (Anthropology, 2002); Talbot Taylor (English, 1994); and James Axtell (History, 1981).