Wendy Bellion’s Book Honored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Wendy Bellion, associate professor of history at the University of Delaware, received the 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is being honored for her book Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). The prize jury said that the book was “an engrossing study, both for what it tells us about the history of American picturing and for its capacity to fascinate and delight its readers, who plunge along with Bellion into an image-obsessed world uncannily similar to our own.”

As a result of the award, Dr. Bellion will give the annual Eldredge Prize lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum this fall. In 2015, Dr. Bellion will be the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the National Institute for the History of Art in Paris.

Dr. Bellion holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Illinois.