The Ursula Hoff Fellowship was relaunched in 2024 with an extended Fellowship of two years awarded to Dr. Jessica Clark. Clark will explore The University’s print collections through research that conveys printmaking as intercultural fusion: of ideas, cultures, technologies, histories, and stories tied to lived experience.
Jessica Clark is a proud palawa/pallawah woman and a curator of contemporary art. She holds a PhD Fine Arts and Music, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, having recently undertaken practice-led curatorial research investigating how intercultural curatorial models reframe and redefine narratives, understandings, and experiences of Aboriginal art. She is currently Yalingwa Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
About Ursula Hoff
Dr. Ursula Hoff AO OBE LLD PhD (Hamburg) D Lit (Monash) was born in 1909 in London and died in 2005 in Melbourne. Dr. Hoff’s distinguished career encompassed art history, curatorship and museum management at the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Educated in Hamburg, she was among the pivotal first generation of European-trained art historians who introduced the subject to Australian universities. Dr. Hoff was a lecturer in the then Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne and worked at the National Gallery of Victoria, becoming its assistant director from 1968–73. She was the London Adviser to the Felton Bequest from 1975–83. Dr. Hoff was a foundation fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1970 and member of the Council of the National Library of Australia. Her numerous scholarly publications include studies of Arthur Boyd, Charles Conder, John Brack and William Blake.
Aims of the Fellowship
Dr. Ursula Hoff bequeathed funds to the University of Melbourne to establish a fellowship for the study and promotion of prints held in the collections of the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria. In recognition of Dr. Hoff’s scholarly and professional achievements, the Fellowship is awarded annually to a candidate displaying a commitment to research into prints, the history of print collecting and the scholarly activities of museums and universities.
The Fellowship aims to:
- encourage research into prints held by the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria, and by extension research into the history of prints and print collecting in Australia;
- encourage scholarly activity within the print collections of the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria;
- support the professional and intellectual development of an early career researcher; and
- promote interest in prints and print collecting.
Benefits
The Ursula Hoff Fellowship is offered annually. The value of the award is $30,000. The Fellow is offered research access to collections relevant to their research at the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria, subject to the collection access protocols relevant to specific collections. The Fellowship was paused in 2020 due to impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and relaunched in 2024 as an extended two-year opportunity. It will return to an annual cycle in 2026.