Welcoming Isabelle Gillet, 2021 Irving Stenn Jr Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities and Museum Pedagogy

UMMA and U-M History of Art Department are happy to announce that Ph.D. candidate Isabelle Gillet has been selected as UMMA's Irving Stenn Jr. Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities and Museum Pedagogy for the 2021 academic year. 

Endowed in 2014 by longtime UMMA supporter Irving Stenn, Jr. (BA ’52, JD ’55), this fellowship directly addresses key initiatives for UMMA in nurturing promising young scholars and exposing them to career paths in the museum. Isabelle will work closely with Andrew W. Mellon Curator for University Learning and Programs David Choberka on multiple projects over the next year.

Gillet’s selection comes after a redefinition of the scope of fellowships endowed by Stenn. Previous Fellows specialized in curatorial work and developing exhibitions in deep collaboration with UMMA. As the 2021 Stenn Fellow in Public and Digital Humanities and Museum Pedagogy, Gillet will be working with the Museum’s Public Experience and Learning team on projects that touch university learning, public engagement, and K-12 programs. 

She will work as an integral part of the University Learning team throughout the year, training in museum pedagogy and designing learning experiences for classes from across campus. She will also pursue numerous special projects that engage UMMA's various publics, from research collaborations with UM faculty to supporting continuing education in the docent program and developing public programs for upcoming exhibitions.

Gillet is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art department, where she is writing a dissertation about portraits of women exhibited at Salon exhibitions in Paris between 1815 and 1848. Her research specifically addresses how women performed social and civic participation during a time when they were not legal citizens. She became fascinated with the rise of portraiture and its coincidence to the implementation of legal texts, while pursuing a double degree in Law and Art History at the Sorbonne in Paris.

She has explored similar themes in previous work with collections and exhibitions. In the summer of 2019, Gillet co-curated Divide & Clothe: Illustrating Fashion in Nineteenth-Century Europe from the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library along with contributions from a local private collection. The exhibition demonstrated how the depiction of fashion in the printed press, often stereotypically gendered, can be greatly revealing of ongoing political tensions and cultural shifts.