mhfisk@umail.ucsb.edu
Areas of Concentration: 18th- and 19th-century American Art
Faculty Advisors: E. Bruce Robertson and Ann Bermingham
Dissertation Title: "Paradox of Elitism: Vision, Risk, and Diplomacy in the European Career of Colonel John Trumbull"

Matthew is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He holds M.A. degrees in both art history and museum studies, respectively.  His dissertation, “Paradox of Elitism: Vision, Risk, and Diplomacy in the European Career of Colonel John Trumbull,” reconsiders Trumbull's life and works within the context of eighteenth-century Federalist political ethos, American foreign policy, and nationalist trends of the Neoclassical academic style, through the War of 1812.  Articulating Trumbull as the Smithian "economic man," Matthew explores Trumbull's artistic practice as both the foundation, but also the failure, of a conservative Federalist aesthetic that was usurped when a more radical Democratic-Republicanism became the dominant cultural discourse in the first decades of the nineteenth century.  Currently teaching in the Boston area of Massachusetts, Matthew has held a wide array of teaching and museum positions in American, European, and contemporary art.  Matthew’s research has been supported by a number of grants and fellowships, including the ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Junior Fellowship in London, the Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting Junior Fellowship in New York, the Washington College Fellowship in American History Fellowship at the Boston Athenaeum, and others.  He also holds a certificate from the Winterthur Winter Institute in Early-American Decorative Arts and Material Culture.