Elizabeth Fair

Elizabeth Fair (2019) studies cultural landscapes and ideas of heritage in California, especially in regard to transpacific migration, through evolving vernacular and institutional interpretations of art, architecture, and material culture. Her dissertation focuses on Chinese American architecture and architectural objects of the 19th and 20th centuries, and intersections with landscape, memory, and history, moving from Sacramento Valley 19th century temples to Angel Island to the San Francisco Chinatown YWCA. In 2024-5 she is a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art, and she was a 2023-4 Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art and a 2024 Short-Term Research Fellow at the Huntington Library. She is a volunteer consultant for the Chinese Historical Society of America (San Francisco) collections and co-organizer of the Berkeley/Stanford graduate student working group on transpacific and Asian American art histories. She holds a BA and MA in History from Stanford University and before starting the PhD worked for the Angel Island State Park Immigration Station Museum.