The Rijksmuseum Fellowship Programme 2022 - 2023

This Fellowship focuses on the Netherlands as an international intersection of art, artists, artistic ideas and materials. In recent decades, art and cultural historical studies have seen an upsurge in the scholarly attention paid to wide themes such as mobility, cultural networks, shared cultural heritage and globalization. The Rijksmuseum has actively contributed to this development, and international interfaces with Netherlandish art have been central to its collection and exhibition policy in the past decades.

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship is in keeping with these themes, and aims to stimulate high-quality, object-based research, focusing on the Low Countries as a centre of international cultural exchange at large.

The Terra Foundation for American Art offers early career scholars the opportunity to conduct photo-historical research into American photography in the Rijksmuseum collection. Since 2005, it has been the Rijksmuseum’s photography acquisition policy to predominantly collect American photographs. This has naturally prompted the desire to make the Rijksmuseum’s collection of American photographs more accessible and widely known.

Currently, the team of Photography Curators of the Rijksmuseum is preparing a major exhibition of its collection of American photographs—from the birth of the medium in 1839 to the present—in a wider context.

This Fellowship offers early career scholars the opportunity to conduct historical research into objects in the Rijksmuseum collection. Candidates are invited to submit a research proposal that draws on these objects as subject material and as sources of historical information.

The Johan Huizinga Fellowship is primarily intended for candidates whose focus is on the historical role and symbolic meaning of objects, on material culture and/or the societal context in which these artifacts were used.

This Fellowship enables early career scholars to conduct conservation and scientific research on art works and historical artefacts. Focus should be the Rijksmuseum collection or ideation that has been initiated at the Rijksmuseum. A suitable project might entail technical research into objects in the Rijksmuseum’s collection or analytical techniques, preventive conservation, or treatment methodologies.

This fellowship enables candidates to collaborate with conservators, curators and scientists active at the Rijksmuseum. The Fellowship will preferably result in an article for publication, the content and form of which will be decided by the Fellow in consultation with the Rijksmuseum.

This Fellowship enables History of Art PhD candidates from the University of Pennsylvania to conduct dissertation research at the Rijksmuseum. The Fellowship is funded by a University of Pennsylvania alumna.

Applications should include an outline of the proposed research, related to the Rijksmuseum's holdings, its history and activities. A suitable project might entail the study of art objects as artistic or historical sources or object-related archival research.