Double achievement: Professor Angelo Lo Conte receives both HSSPFS and GRF funding for inspiring art history and humanities projects

In the 2026/27 University Grants Committee (UGC)’s funding cycle, Professor Angelo Lo Conte, Associate Professor and Associate Director (Research) at the Academy of Visual Arts, achieved a dual success by securing selection for two competitive schemes: the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme (HSSPFS) and the General Research Fund (GRF).

The HSSPFS supports Professor Lo Conte’s project “Deaf Painters in the Renaissance” with a grant of HK$398,200.

The project aims to produce the first monograph analysing the careers of deaf painters in early modern Europe. Drawing on diverse visual and textual archives, it will uncover how these artists navigated their daily lives and networks. By demonstrating how premodern responses to impairment were shaped by complex intersectional factors, the study challenges long-standing stereotypes and addresses a major gap in early modern art historical scholarship.

Simultaneously, his GRF-funded project, “Sensing Difference: Blindness, Deafness, and the Canon of Art History”, positions historical artists with disabilities as the protagonists of their own narratives, exploring how sensory impairment was perceived and experienced during the early modern period. 

Bridging art history and disability studies, this research moves beyond traditional frameworks that relegate disabled historical figures to the margins of poverty and isolation. Instead, it leverages rich archival and visual evidence to demonstrate that premodern responses to impairment were profoundly shaped by intersectional factors such as class, gender, and specialised skill. 

Through microhistories, the project examines how sensory loss influenced workshop dynamics, training methodologies, and patron networks – dismantling long-standing stereotypes of a uniformly bleak, exclusionary pre-Enlightenment world.

The project will receive a HK$290,000 grant from the GRF.

“It is an incredible privilege to have been selected among such a distinguished cohort of fellows,” Professor Lo Conte comments on receiving the HSSPFS. “This fellowship offers the precious gift of dedicated time, allowing me to fully focus on my research at the intersections of art history, social history, and disability studies”.

Professor Lo Conte’s research profile: https://scholars.hkbu.edu.hk/en/persons/ANGELOLOCONTE