Faculty & Student News
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Faculty news
Dear Alumni,
As last year’s events and activities recede and next year’s begin to generate excitement, I wanted to write you with art history news. Our department has long wanted to keep in better touch with alumni and that has now become easier. We have redesigned our Web site, making it more informative and more user-friendly, and we are on a campaign to update contact information so that we can reach more of you effectively. Art History is in transition, and we are anxious to make you part of it.
Last year was busy and rewarding. Our Burke Lecture Series continued in its tradition of bringing outstanding scholars to campus. We enjoyed delightful lectures on such topics as Central African art, 19th century illustration, Chinese art and politics, American landscape painting (by a British art historian, no less), and the politics of defining “contemporary.” We also had six additional lectures because the department was interviewing for two faculty positions, both filled. Along with these activities the School of Fine Arts gallery (SOFA) as usual offered up a series of highly dynamic and thought provoking shows, while the IU Art Museum presented several fine exhibitions, ranging from African Currency to Art and Travel in Europe.
Among our faculty accomplishments, Sarah Burns spent the year as a distinguished fellow at the Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowship in Art History at the Newberry Library in Chicago—a most prestigious appointment and Sarah is the first art historian to have been so honored. Christiane Gruber was extremely active around campus, guest curating an exhibition in the IU Art Museum on Islamic book art, in which she involved several of our graduate students who contributed to an edited scholarly book that will be published this fall. Several of us published books this past year, including:
Sarah Burns: Co-Authored American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (California 2009)
Michelle Facos: Symbolist Art in Context (California 2008)
Christiane Gruber: The Timurid Book of Ascension (Mi’rajnama): A Study ofText and Image in a Pan Asian Context (Valencia, 2008) and The Ilkhanid Book of Ascension: A Persian-Sunni Devotional Tale
(London, 2009)
Giles Knox: The Late Paintings of Velázquez: Theorizing Painterly Performance (Ashgate 2009)
Patrick McNaughton: A Bird Dance Near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo And The Art Of West African Masquerade (Bloomington, IU Press, 2008)
Julie Van Voorhis: Aphrodisias ll. Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias (R.R.R. Smith 2008)
Michelle Facos, who was promoted to the rank of Full Professor, is garnering much international attention for research projects that emphasize the relevance of art to national identity in the very early 20th century.
Giles Knox, who was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with Tenure, made a dramatic scholarly move as a Renaissance expert researching Spanish art, and his book has been so well received it is already being translated into Spanish.
Through their student organization (AHA, the Art History Association) our graduate students once again choreographed an excellent annual symposium, Art on the Edge: Contesting Boundaries in Art and Art History, and once again the talks were very high caliber. We are fortunate to have consistently excellent graduate students, and this past year several of them were awarded major research fellowships
In addition, our graduate students will continue to run their Brown Bag Presentations, which feature informal lectures on research in progress and can be attended by anyone who is interested. There will be more outstanding exhibitions from both SOFA and the Indiana University Art Museum. For example, SOFA will present a William Itter retrospective, while the IU Art Museum will exhibit a large selection of William Itter’s collection of African ceramics, textiles, and basketry. Both of these exhibitions will be visually stunning and well worth a visit.
We are most fortunate to have two new faculty members joining us. Sarah Bassett is a specialist in the arts and visual culture around the Mediterranean Sea from when the Roman Empire dwindled and Christianity rose to the rise of Islam. She is well published and a great asset to our department and the University. Dawna Schuld has just received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She specializes in contemporary art, especially in America, and is an expert on conceptual and installation art, and even the modern history of gardens. We could not be more pleased to welcome these fine teachers and researchers to our program.
If you get a chance, please do visit our revitalized website www.indiana.edu/~arthist. In the meantime, we are anxious to have up to date contact information on all of our alumni. In addition we would love to hear your news, and even share it on our website and future newsletters if you would find that desirable. Many undergraduate art history majors do not make careers of art history. But we have found to our delight that a many alumni feel their art history interests and backgrounds have proven quite beneficial in their careers or in their lives. If you have found this to be true we would love to hear about it.Yours sincerely,
Patrick McNaughton
Chancellor’s Professor of African Art History
Chair, Department of the History of Art
