Dana Rehn: 2017 Bill Cowan Barr Smith Library Fellow: 2017 Bill Cowan Barr Smith Library Fellow
The Barr Smith Library and the Cowan Grant are pleased to announce that Dana Rehn is the successful applicant for the 2017 Bill Cowan Barr Smith Library Fellowship from a strong field of candidates.
The purpose of the award is to assist research postgraduates financially with uninterrupted time to work with the Library’s collections.
On receiving the award Dana said – ‘I am excited, somewhat speechless, and honoured to receive the Bill Cowan Barr Smith Library Fellowship. It will be enormously helpful and allow me the time to focus exclusively on my research during the important final stage of my PhD candidacy under otherwise demanding financial circumstances. I am deeply grateful to the Cowan Grant and the Award Committee’.
Dana is a doctoral candidate in Art History in the University of Adelaide Faculty of Arts. Her research is in the field of early modern European esoteric art with a focus on the representation of the ‘Other’, which explores themes of human-animal hybridity and transformation. Her thesis examines the motif of the canine-human hybrid in German Renaissance prints with the preliminary title of The Big Bad Wolf: representations of the “Other” in German Renaissance Prints.
The research examines how the canine-human image was used for propaganda and to demonise and socially marginalise perceived outsiders and the oppositional Other in the turbulent period of the Reformation and Northern Renaissance in Germany. Dana has already published some of her research in peer-reviewed articles including Going to the Dogs: The Foreign and Religious Other in German Renaissance Prints.
Dana will be spending lots of time in the Barr Smith Library. The library has a broad historical and art historical general collection and some specific Special Collections items without which her research could not be conducted without extensive international travel. Even so her need for graphic images from collections is international and she appreciates the subsidy which the Library provides to the Fellowship for document delivery needs.