ST. LOUIS, MO.- The Saint Louis Art Museum announced that Dr. Melanie Michailidis has been awarded a joint Fellowship in collaboration with Washington University in St. Louis. Co-sponsored by the Saint Louis Art Museum and Washington University in St. Louis, the three-year post-doctoral fellowship will allow Michailidis to divide her time between the Museum and the University and bring to both institutions an Islamic specialist.

Michailidis received her Bachelor of Arts in political science, Russian and French from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in 1988; her Master of Arts in the history of art and archaeology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 2000; and a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. Michailidis received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, and was nominated for the Excellence in Education Award by the association of students at the University of California, Davis in May 2010.

“The Museum is delighted with the appointment of Dr. Michailidis and with the new fellowship with Washington University in St. Louis,” said Brent R. Benjamin, Saint Louis Art Museum director. “This is a terrific example of true institutional collaboration.”

"I am very pleased to support this postdoctoral program and pleased that the inaugural appointment goes to someone as outstanding as Dr. Michailidis,” said Gary Wihl, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “This is the first step in what I hope will be a deep and on-going partnership between our institutions.”

At the Art Museum, the Fellowship is being supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and at the University with the help of a generous gift by alumnus Jack Korff.

"We are quite excited to add Dr. Michailidis to our faculty for the coming three years. She will expand our curriculum significantly with courses on the arts of the Islamic world, and her students will have important exposure to her research on the outstanding Islamic objects owned by the Saint Louis Art Museum," said Professor Elizabeth Childs, Chair, Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.

During the first year of her fellowship, Michailidis will teach courses for one semester at the University, and move for six months to the Museum. This fall at the University, Michailidis will teach courses entitled “Art of the Islamic World” and “Ceramics of the Islamic World.” At the Museum in the spring of 2012, she will study and catalogue the collection of Islamic ceramics, textiles, and metalwork from the 10th to 19th centuries, as well as a small but significant group of manuscripts.