Winner of the 2024 Lalive Merryman Fellowship

I have been awarded the 2024 Pierre Lalive and John Henry Merryman Fellowship in Art and Cultural Heritage Law!

Since 2018, the International Cultural Property Society and the Art-Law Centre of the University of Geneva award, in co-sponsorhip with LALIVE Geneva, a fellowship honouring the legacy of two outstanding scholars of art and cultural property law: Pierre Lalive (1923-2014) and John H. Merryman (1920-2015).

“The Fellowship is awarded to a scholar for the best article published in the International Journal of Cultural Property in the preceding calendar year. To be eligible, the author must have been under 40 years of age at the time of the article’s publication.”

—from the journal website

The Fellowship is valued at CHF 6,000 which are to be used towards a research stay at the Art-Law Centre in Geneva of two to four weeks in the year following the announcement of the winner.

For the current period, the selection committee has chosen my article on the legal remedies for the repatriation of Brazilian fossils from Germany. This is an incredibly generous and prestigious recognition of my work of which I am very proud, and I am most excited about the opportunities and increased visibility for my research that come with it. There are times when I doubt whether taking my work into such a particular and, for the most part, lonely niche - but moments like this reassure me that my research might actually be worthwhile.

And: Having lived in Geneva for two years during my master’s at the Geneva Graduate Institute, I’m very happy about the chance to go back there for a little while for personal reasons, too.

Reference

Stewens, Paul Philipp. 2023. “‘Ubirajara’ and Irritator Belong to Brazil: Achieving Fossil Returns Under German Private Law.” International Journal of Cultural Property 30 (3): 298–318. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0940739124000031.