University of Arkansas History Professor Named NEH Summer Fellow

Photo Submitted

Richard Sonn

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Richard Sonn, professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, has been asked to join the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, World War I and the Arts: Sound, Vision, Psyche. The institute will meet June 22-July 19 at the University of Cincinnati as part of events recognizing the 100 year anniversary of World War I.

“Professor Sonn’s selection for this NEH Summer Institute is an important contribution to our Top 50 initiative,” said Kathryn Sloan, chair of the department of history. “Prestigious, nationally-competitive grants like the NEH are essential to getting the University of Arkansas into the national spotlight.”

NEH Summer institutes are designed to provide a space for professional enrichment. Directed by University of Cincinnati’s professor Elizabeth B. Frierson, the World War I and the Arts forum brings together prominent scholars of the period to exchange research ideas and teaching resources regarding the Great War. Participants are encouraged to search beyond the traditional understanding of a conflict among only white Europeans challenging this interpretation in two ways. First, by engaging the history of the war on its many fronts. Second, by investigating the war’s impact among non-whites in both the colonial territories and in Europe.

Sonn is currently researching the early 20th century Jewish artistic community of France. The working title of his project is Jewish Modernism: Immigrant Artists of Paris, 1905-1940. Despite having relatively little Jewish tradition of painting and sculpture, the generation that came of age around the time of the First World War flocked to Paris, and more particularly to the left-bank artist colony of Montparnasse, to participate in the new movements of cubism, expressionism and surrealism. The most famous names from this milieu were the Sephardic Jews Amedeo Modigliani and Jules Pascin, and the Ashkenazi Jews Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Jacques Lipchitz and many others. In fact, more than 500 immigrant Jewish artists were working in Montparnasse in the 1920s.

Sonn is the author of Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (University of Nebraska, 1989), Anarchism (Twayne, 1992) and Sex, Violence and the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France, (Penn State, 2010).