2024, Aleksander Musial

New York, NY — Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation is pleased to announce Aleksander Musial as the recipient of its 2024 Museum Fellowship. The Fellowship will support his research at the Soane Museum in London where Mr. Musial, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University, will be in residence this summer.

The Soane Foundation’s Museum Fellowship offers graduate students an opportunity to explore the legacy of Sir John Soane through onsite research of the Museum’s collections and archives. Mr. Musial plans to take full advantage of this extraordinary access to examine the impact that Soane continues to have on modern architects and scholars for his doctoral dissertation, Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, ca. 1600–1830. A graduate in Classics from the University of Cambridge and in Art History from the University of Warsaw, Mr. Musiał is specializing in early modern art and architecture. His research has been supported with fellowships and visiting positions at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, at the British School and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. He has published articles in the Princeton University Art Museum Record, and the Oxford Art Journal, for which he was awarded the Emerging Scholars Publication Prize by the CAA’s Society of Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.

Soane Museum Foundation Board Chairman Paul L. Whalen noted: “We had such an impressive group of applicants this year and are so delighted with the selection of Aleksander Musial as the 2024 Soane Museum Foundation Fellow. His research embodies the essence of the Fellowship and the impact Soane’s vision continues to have on architects, designers, and scholars.” Soane Museum Director Will Gompertz shared his pleasure at the announcement: “Hosting successive Soane Fellows since the award was inaugurated in 1995 has always been a very positive experience for the Museum. It is very gratifying to see how the scholars visibly benefit from the uninterrupted time to work on their research using the resources of the Soane collection. The staff gain a lot too, not just from the further insight into the collection, but also from the more informal exchanges of ideas over coffee or lunch. Lasting relationships are formed which continue to benefit the Museum as the young scholars progress through their careers.”

Established to support graduate school research, the Soane Foundation’s Museum Fellowship grants graduate students in architecture, design, and the decorative arts with an opportunity to study the work of Sir John Soane in his Drawing Office. The Soane Foundation Museum Fellowship Program gives graduate students in art history, architecture, art, and the decorative arts a grant to pursue research projects related to the work of Sir John Soane and the Soane Museum’s collections.

For more information about Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation and its Fellowship program, visit www.soanefoundation.org.