The Getty Scholars Program supports researchers in advancing knowledge of the arts and humanities and producing cutting-edge scholarship that contributes to the understanding and preservation of cultural heritage. While in residence, scholars have the opportunity to spend significant time at one of the world’s premier art history collections while contributing to an international community committed to intellectual exploration and exchange. Scholars may be in residence at the Getty Center or Getty Villa.

A mix of senior scholars and junior fellows are selected for the Scholars Program cohort. The cohort’s research projects are focused on an annual theme. The three main grant categories are:

1. Scholar Grants for established researchers and professionals who have held PhDs for at least 5 years and/or possess strong records of publication and professional activity, at the Getty Center or Getty Villa
2. Postdoctoral Fellowships for recently granted PhDs at the Getty Center or Getty Villa
3. Predoctoral Fellowships for PhD candidates at the Getty Center

This page provides information about Scholar Grants for established researchers and professionals residing at the Getty Center.

• Annual Theme: Extinction

  Each application cycle has its own theme that addresses a consequential topic in the arts and humanities. The scholar cohort for that year carries out research projects that respond to this theme, which serves to bridge the various subfields and methodologies of those in residence and provides shared terrain for collaboration, connection, and exchange while also opening up new interdisciplinary conversations.

  Extinction

  The arts have the capacity to mitigate against cultural loss by visualizing, capturing, and interpreting aspects of the fleeting, the ephemeral, and the unrecoverable. In this moment of extreme environmental decay and monumental epidemic loss, the Getty Scholars Program invites applications on the pressing topic of extinction and its bearing on the visual arts and cultural heritage. Scholars are asked to contemplate how representational practices are deployed to cope with the precarious survival of plants, animals, and humans; the ever-present specter of species-level extinction and resource exhaustion; and, at the most extreme pole, the brutality of mass atrocity. On another level, atrophy, decay, and obsolescence constitute the temporal dimensions of certain artistic practices, especially as creative approaches, technologies, media, formats, and ideals become outmoded or superseded. The finality of disappearance may also portend a certain amount of hope for rebirth, innovation, or recovery.

  This year’s theme welcomes research topics that explore that which is lost, but also the urgent impulse toward preservation and permanence. Beyond loss, destruction, or mortality, the topic also seeks to explore the creative and productive possibilities that extinction may enable.

  Guiding Questions

  • How have recent scientific or technological advances made it possible to visualize lost sites, beings, and objects?
  • What new habitations and communities have emerged or survived from the processes and effects of extinction?
  • Historians, archaeologists, and cultural heritage scholars work actively to preserve and protect certain categories of visual, material, and built culture. Yet there are cases in which obsolescence is warranted, even invited. What do we choose to save and why? Who decides upon the criteria and what is the logic?
  • Many forms of human expression are not meant to endure, such as performance, storytelling, music, and dance. What is the relationship between artistic forms and cultural practices that have been lost and their more durable records and traces?
  • The most devastating loss is that of entire cultures and groups, sometimes targets of intentional annihilation. How can precarious forms of indigenous knowledge and fragile cultural identities that are in danger of extinction be conveyed, preserved, and represented? How might communities challenge predictions and presumptions of extinction?

  • African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI) Fellowship

    In addition to the annual theme, grants are available under the AAAHI Fellowship. This residential program provides financial support and housing to scholars who are expanding critical inquiry of African American art and its frameworks. As part of the larger scholar year cohort, AAAHI Fellows have opportunities to present their research and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary group of peers. While proposals do not have to address the concurrent annual theme, they may highlight any salient intersections with it.

    AAAHI will support two fellows to generate new knowledge in the expanding field of African American art history. Projects that propose engagement with Getty’s growing collections of archival and primary source material related to African American art history—particularly post-World War II—are welcome. However, relevance to Getty holdings is not a project requirement. We invite applications from scholars who focus on African American art and visual culture in all time periods and media and in a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions. Applicants should indicate how their project would align with AAAHI’s aim to make African American art history more visible to the public and accessible to the scholarly community worldwide.

    Get all the details + application information, here.