NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities Dean, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
- People
- Professor
Adrian Randolph is Professor of Art History. His work examines medieval and Renaissance Italian art and architecture, with a focus on Florence. Research interests include gender, politics, poetry, space, sense and emotion in relation to fifteenth-century Italian, and especially Florentine painting, sculpture and architecture. His current research considers Donatello's Mary Magdalen, and issues of cultural, material and biological hybridity. Before joining the faculty of Northwestern, Randolph was Leon E. Williams Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College, where he was also Director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities. With Mark J. Williams he co-edits the book series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture (University Press of New England).
Job Titles:
- People
- Visiting Assistant Professor
Adrienn Kácsor is a scholar of the transnational art, architecture, and visual culture of socialist internationalism in the twentieth century, with a geographic focus spanning from Central and Eastern Europe to Central Asia. She is currently turning her dissertation into a book manuscript, entitled Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919-1956, which studies the aesthetics and politics of Soviet internationalism from a migrant perspective, critically examining how Hungarian migrants committed to communism participated in the production of Soviet culture while in exile in Europe, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Kirghizia between the 1920s and 1940s, and in Eastern Europe upon their return to their homeland after World War II. In the course of extensive research that sought to map the multifold movements of the Hungarian migrants in what is today Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Austria, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, Kácsor became interested in developing research methodologies that can bring marginalized agents-especially migrant women-to the forefront and excavate histories that have long been silenced or forgotten. Her recent article in the Getty Research Journal, "Tracing Fannina Halle in El Lissitzky's Letters," a feminist intervention in the archive of the Soviet avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, exemplifies her interest in unsettling structural invisibilities embedded in and reproduced by archives and art histories.
In collaboration with Douglas Gabriel, Kácsor has also published on the transnational art of socialist friendship during the Cold War, with a particular focus on artistic and architectural exchanges between Hungary and North Korea in the 1950s. Their collaborative work has been included in the 2022 special issue of Art History, "Red Networks: Post-War Art Exchange," edited by Vivian Li, and in the 2023 volume Universal - International - Global: Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe, edited by Beáta Hock, Marina Dmitrieva, and Antje Kempe.
Kácsor's research has been generously funded by Barbara Shanley Travel Research Grants (2016 and 2017), the Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR; 2018-2019), a Getty Library Research Grant (2019), The Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF; 2020-2021), and The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021-2023). Prior to her doctoral studies at Northwestern University, Kácsor studied journalism and history at the Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
Caticha's research has been supported by the 2018-2020 24-month Chester Dale Fellowship from the Center for the Advanced Studies of the Visual Arts, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Newberry Library.
Other research and teaching interests include the relationship between popular culture, fashion, and art history from the eighteenth-century to the present day. She has published on this topic in Journal18, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and American Quarterly.
Alissa Schapiro is an educator and curator who studies art objects that reflect transnational and transcultural histories, especially those that speak to racial and ethnic exclusion, exile and migration, and gender discrimination across the Americas throughout the 20th century. Her doctoral research on the relationship between U.S. art and antisemitism during World War II has been supported by leading Jewish and Holocaust Studies organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Schapiro regularly lectures to academic and museum audiences about World War II-era art, and she consults on various projects related to Holocaust history and memory. As a curator, Schapiro has contributed to museum exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Tate Britain. Most recently, Schapiro served as one of the three co-curators for the exhibition and award-winning publication Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, which debuted at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2020 and then traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2022. Schapiro holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a master's from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Amanda Alvarez is a doctoral student of Art History and artist, researching the artistic and social exchanges between Latin America and Europe during the nascency of the avant-garde. Their current work aims to uncover modes of existence that were altered by colonialism and the aftereffects of Primitivist thought on scholarship of Latin American art. Before their time at Northwestern, their most recent curatorial collaboration was "Painting Situations: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter" at the University Gallery at the University of Florida, in collaboration with the ISLAA Art Initiative in New York. Amanda received their BA in Art History from the University of Florida.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Editorial Board of the Series Classica
- People
- Professor Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities
- Specialist in the Visual and Material Culture of the Pre - Islamic Middle East
Ann C. Gunter is a specialist in the visual and material culture of the pre-Islamic Middle East and its Eastern Mediterranean neighbors. Her primary research interests include artistic and cultural interaction between the Mediterranean and the Near East; the relationship between material culture and social and cultural identity; and the modern reception of ancient Greek and Near Eastern art. Her books include A Collector's Journey: Charles Lang Freer and Egypt (Freer Gallery of Art, 2002) and Greek Art and the Orient (Cambridge, 2009). She has also edited several volumes, among them Investigating Artistic Environments in the Ancient Near East (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1990); Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950, with Stefan R. Hauser (Brill, 2005); and A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019). Her recent contributions to conference volumes include Das Weltreich der Perser: Rezeption, Aneignung, Verargumentierung (Harassowitz, 2019); Beyond Egyptomania: Objects, Style, and Agency (DeGruyter, 2020); and The Connected Iron Age: Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 BCE (University of Chicago, 2022). Her graduate training included archaeological fieldwork in Turkey, and she has also published excavated material from several sites, including Gordion/Yassıhöyük and Labraunda.
Gunter is a member of the editorial board of the series Classica et Orientalia (Harrassowitz Verlag) and the journal State Archives of Assyria Bulletin. She is also a board member of the Melammu Project: The Heritage of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, an international research network sponsoring workshops and symposia, and their resulting publications.
Job Titles:
- Department Chair
- People
- the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities Department Chair
Christina Kiaer (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) teaches Global modern art and visual culture in the twentieth-century, specializing in the Soviet Union and the art of the Soviet empire and international socialism, with special interests in collective art practices, the aesthetics of anti-racism, the lived experience of socialism and revolution, women, everyday life, consumption, and affect. Her book Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in early 2024. She is currently completing the project "Aesthetics of Anti-racism: Black Americans in Soviet Visual Culture," from which she has published several articles, most recently "Resisting Amerikanizm through Racial Solidarity: Black Skin, 1931," in Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: Soviet-American Architectural Exchanges, 1917-1945 (MIT Press, 2023). Her first book Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press, 2005) was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. That year she also published an interdisciplinary volume of essays, Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana University Press; co-edited with Eric Naiman).
Kiaer serves on the Steering Committee of the Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies (REEES) Research Program in Weinberg College. In opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she co-organized the international symposium "The Collective Body Dismembered: Histories of Art, Identities and the War in Ukraine" at the National Gallery of Denmark on May 31, 2022 (see thecollectivebody.net). Artists, curators and scholars from Ukraine and other countries discussed the collective, anti-imperialist and anti-racist body imagined by the visual culture of international Soviet socialism, and the definitive ruin of this collective body by the current imperialist war, which is being waged in the now cynical language of "brotherly nations."
Kiaer appeared in the film Rouge! L'Art au Pays des Soviets (2019), which was broadcast on French television and screened during the run of the exhibition Rouge! Art et utopie au pays des Soviets at the Grand Palais, Par is in Spring 2019. She was co-curator, with Robert Bird and Zachary Cahill, of Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum, University of Chicago, and an editor and author of the catalog, Revolution Every Day: A Calendar (Milan: Mousse Publishing, with the Smart Museum of Art, 2017). She was also a consultant, member of the catalog collective and catalog essay writer for the exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test at the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she served as special advisor to the 2011 exhibition Aleksandr Deineka: An Avant-Garde for the Proletariat at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid, and consultant curator on the 2009 exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism at the Tate Modern Museum, London.
For the 2021-22 academic year, she was awarded a Novo Nordisk Foundation Visiting Professorship at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has held postdoctoral research grants from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the American Philosophical Society; the Social Science Research Council; and the J. Paul Getty Foundation, among others.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Christina Normore researches and teaches medieval art, with an emphasis on 14th- and 15th-century northwestern Europe. While her specific topics of investigation range broadly, her work is united by a concern with how medieval art objects and practices challenge current methodologies and reshape our understanding of period and geographical divisions. Her first book, A Feast for the Eyes: Art, Performance and the Late Medieval Banquet (University of Chicago Press, 2015), argued that banquet organizers and participants developed sophisticated ways of appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, thereby forging a court culture that delighted in the exercise of fine aesthetic judgment.
At present, she is engaged in two long-term research projects. The first considers how militarism was promoted and questioned by material culture ranging from intimate mirror backs and manuscript margins to the wasting and fortification of the landscape in France, Flanders and England. Her second research project critically engages the possibilities as well as the problems posed by the rapidly expanding scholarly and institutional interest in transcultural exchanges in the Old World. She recently edited a volume showcasing current work on this topic by Byzantinists, East Asianists, Islamicists and Western medievalists (Reassessing the Global Turn in Medieval Art History (Arc Humanities Press, 2018)).
She will not be taking on any students for the academic year 2023-24.
Job Titles:
- People
- the Inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History, Washington University
Claudia Swan (PhD Columbia University) studies and teaches northern European visual culture 1400-1700, art and science, the history of collecting, the history of the imagination, and the Global Baroque. She has edited and authored five books and has published numerous articles and book chapters on early modern art, science, and collecting and on Dutch visual culture. Swan is the author of The Clutius Botanical Watercolors. Plants and Flowers of the Renaissance, on Renaissance botanical illustrations; and Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629), which studies the intersection of empiricism and witchcraft in Holland in the early seventeenth century through the work of the Dutch artist Jacques de Gheyn. Professor Swan is co-editor of Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, Politics and Image, Imagination, and Cognition. Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice, and editor of Tributes to David Freedberg. Image and Insight, and has two edited volumes of essays underway. Swan has been a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ; the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin; CRASSH, Cambridge University; and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. Her forthcoming book is Rarities of these Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Golden Age.
Job Titles:
- Mary Jane Crowe Professor Emeritus
- People
David Van Zanten taught courses in American and European architecture and urbanism after 1800. He has contributed to the exhibition catalogues The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1975, 1977) and The Second Empire (1979-1980). His Designing Paris: The Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer won the 1988 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He extended this work in Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). His book Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan was published by W. W. Norton in 2000. He pushed the issues broached there further in his contributions to the 2013 Block Museum exhibition Drawing the Future.
He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001-02) to study the development of Paris, London, Vienna and Hamburg. Recently he held appointments at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (2006) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2008), both in Paris. He will be retiring in the spring of 2018.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Art Institute of Chicago
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- People
Hannah Feldman is not accepting graduate students for the academic year 2024-2025.
Hannah Feldman is Associate Professor of Art History and core faculty in Middle Eastern and North African Studies as well as Comparative Literary Studies. Her research, teaching, and advising center on late modern and contemporary art and visual culture. Her first book, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France (Duke, 2014), has been reviewed in over ten national and international publications, including Art Journal, Art Bulletin, and The American Historical Review. The book revises accounts of mid-century French aesthetics to argue for the centrality of decolonization to the contemporaneous theorization of urban space, photography, the public, spectacle, and the very project of writing history. Research for this project was supported by grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Art History Publication Initiative, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. She is presently working on three related projects, all of which issue from two years of advanced study in the anthropology of space and governmentality at the University of Chicago under the aegis of an Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship: art and public space in Lebanon during the 1990s; love, temporality, and scale in contemporary art; and artist-imagined and developed arts institutions in the MENAT region between 2001 and 2011. She is also interested in alternative and creative forms of art historical writing and scholarly presentation. She has authored numerous articles about contemporary art and visual culture in publications including Artforum, Art Journal, Frieze, nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, October, and Third Text, as well as in exhibition catalogues published by institutions including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Kunsthalle Zürich, Portikus, Museet for Samtidskunst, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Renaissance Society. Her work has been translated into Euskara, French, German, and Spanish. From 2008-2010, she was Chair of the Art Journal editorial board.
Job Titles:
- Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities Dean, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Co - Editor
Kennedy is co-editor (with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi) of the forthcoming volume Settlement (gta Verlag, 2025) and the forthcoming volume Insurgent Domesticities. Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, The Journal of Architecture, Arch+, and The Avery Review. She is a contributor to the volumes German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism & Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023), German Colonial Building Cultures, a Global Architectural History in 100 Visual Primary Sources (Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2023), Unearthing Traces: Dismantling the Imperialist Entanglement of Archives and the Built Environment (EPFL Press and CAN Centre d'Art Neuch tel, 2023), Documents of Contemporary Art: Craft (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2018), and Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for Humanities
James Joseph Hodge
Associate Professor of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for Humanities
Office location: University Hall 407
james.hodge@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- President
- People
- President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago
James Rondeau is the President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to this position, Rondeau led two of the eleven curatorial departments at the museum as the Dittmer Chair and Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art from 2004-2015, as well as Chair and Curator of Photography from 2008-2009.
Mr. Rondeau holds a B.A. in American Civilization from Middlebury College (VT) and an M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College (MA). After serving as the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, he joined the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998, as an Associate Curator of Contemporary Art and rose to become department chair in 2004. From 2004-2015, he defined the museum's internationally respected contemporary art program, taking on the additional interim role of Chair and Curator of Photography from 2008-2009. Over the course of his tenure, he secured numerous major gifts, most notably in 2015, when he ushered in the largest gift of art in the museum's history-the Edlis/Neeson Collection.
Mr. Rondeau has organized over 30 solo exhibitions with artists such as Shirin Neshat (1999), Thomas Hirschhorn (2000), Olafur Eliasson (2000), Stan Douglas (2000), Rineke Dijkstra (2001), Gaylen Gerber+Stephen Prina
Job Titles:
- People
- Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Block Museum of Art
Janet Dees is the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.
Since coming to The Block in 2015, Dees has curated several exhibitions including Hank Willis Thomas: Unbranded (2018); Experiments in Form: Sam Gilliam, Alan Shields, and Frank Stella (201 8); Carrie Mae Weem s: Ritual and Revolution (2017); and If You Remember, I'll Remember (2017).
Prior to her appointment at the Block, Dees was curator at SITE Santa Fe, where she worked since 2008. In addition, her experience includes educational and curatorial positions at the New York African Burial Ground Project (now the African Burial Ground National Monument), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Rosenbach Museum and Library, and the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art at the University of Delaware. Dees was a part of the curatorial team for Unsettled Landscapes, the inaugura l SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas bi ennia l (2014). Her 2015 exhibition Unsuspected Possibilities: Leonardo Drew, Sarah Oppenheimer, Marie Watt was supported by an Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
She is the recipient of a 2018 Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support the development of the forthcoming exhibition A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art and Visual Culture and has been an affiliate of Northwestern's Center for Native American and Indigenous Research since 2018.
Janet Dees
Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art
Office location: The Block Museum of Art
janet.dees@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
- People
- Professor Director of Undergraduate Studies
Jesús Escobar arrived at Northwestern in 2008 and chaired the Department of Art History for seven years between 2010 and 2018. He is a scholar of art, architecture, and urbanism in early modern Spain and the larger Spanish Habsburg world. His 2022 book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy (Penn State University Press), examines government buildings and public spaces built and shaped in the Spanish capital between 1620 and 1700 from local, regional, and global vantage points. It won the 2023 Eleanor Tufts Award from the Society for Iberian Global Art. The book complements The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2003; paperback, 2009), Escobar's exploration of the political and spatial evolution of Madrid from a secondary city of Castile to the seat of a global empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The first book won the 2004 Eleanor Tufts Award and was published in a Spanish-language edition in 2008 by Editorial Nerea. Currently, he is at work on a study of prominent seventeenth-century Americans and their experiences with architecture in Latin America and Europe. With Michael Schreffler of the University of Notre Dame, he is also writing Architecture of the Spanish World, 1500 to 1800, a book under contract with Princeton University Press.
Professor Escobar is Editor of the scholarly book series, Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, published by Penn State University Press. He is also Treasurer of the National Committee for the History of Art and an active participant in several professional societies. His research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
In Fall 2023, Professor Escobar was a Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Upon returning to Evanston, he will teach Baroque Art: Italy & Spain in Winter 2024 and Introduction to Latin American Art in Spring 2024 while also guiding the Senior Thesis Colloquium. Professor Escobar welcomes applications from prospective graduate students interested in architecture, urbanism, and cartography in early modern Spain and its transatlantic empire, as well as the study of architectural and artistic exchange across the Spanish Habsburg world.
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
- Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art History Director of Graduate Studies
- People
- Professor
Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Performance Studies. She teaches and writes about modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa diaspora and the Caribbean, with an emphasis on photography, photographic archives, and lens-based practices. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006), Developing Blackness (The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, 2008), and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015). For Shine, Thompson received the Charles Rufus Morey Award for distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016), the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award for theoretical and methodological contributions to Caribbean Studies from the Caribbean Studies Association (2016), and the James A. Porter Book Award in African American Art History from the James Porter Colloquium (2019). Thompson is the editor of Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology, and Sacred Space (2023) and the co-editor (with Claire Tancons) of En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (D.A.P., 2015). She is the founder of the Institute of the Unarchived, a platform supporting privately-held photographic and videographic archives related to the Caribbean.
Much of Thompson's research explores how the discipline of art history may be interrogated and expanded through the perspective, the side-long glance, of the African diaspora. Thompson's articles on the field of African diasporic art history, on shine in the aesthetics of the African diaspora, on photographic absence and disappearance, and on the concept of Afrotropes (with Huey Copeland) have appeared in Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Representations, American Art, and October respectively. She is also interested in fabulative and refractory modes art historical writing and academic performance. She has received grants and fellowships from the Dedalus Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and was awarded the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in 2009. In 2023, Thompson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Thompson has curated several exhibitions, including Bahamian Visions: Colonial Photographs of the Bahamas (2003); the Third National Exhibition (NE3) (2006); Developing Blackness (2008), and Antonius Roberts: Art, Ecology, and Sacred Space (2023) at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica with the Unnatural History of That Place, Fred Wilson's reinstallation of the collections of the Institute of Jamaica (with Huey Copeland and Wayne Modest) (2007); and co-curated En Mas': Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (with Claire Tancons) (2015), which traveled internationally through 2018.
Thompson is currently working on Refracting Light: Tom Lloyd and the Effect of Art Historical Disregard, a manuscript about artist and activist Tom Lloyd, electronic light, and archival recovery in African American art (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) as well as The Evidence of Things Not Captured (forthcoming, Duke University Press), a book that examines notions of photographic absence, fugitivity, and disappearance in Jamaica. An article from the latter, " ‘I WAS HERE BUT I DISAPEAR': Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin' Martin and Photographic Disappearance in Jamaica," was published in Art Journal in 2018.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Associate Professor Director, Center for Renaissance Studies, the Newberry Library
- Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies
- People
Lia Markey is the Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University and held post-doctoral fellowships at the Folger Library, the Warburg Institute, Harvard's Villa I Tatti, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research explores cross-cultural exchange between Italy and the Americas in the sixteenth century, collecting history, and early modern prints and drawings. Most recently, she has published Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (Penn State University Press, 2016) and a co-edited volume, The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer
- Director of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
- People
Lisa Corrin is the Ellen Philips Katz Director of The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Her previous positions include Director, Williams College Museum of Art, Deputy Director of Art/Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, where she was the artistic lead for its new waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park, Chief Curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London and Assistant Director/Curator of The Contemporary in Baltimore. She has published widely on contemporary art, public art, and critical museology. Her book Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson was given the George Wittenborn Award by the North America Libraries Association in 1994. She has written extensively on Mark Dion's work including contributing to Phaidon's monograph on the artist. Most recently she was co-curator of A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s.
Job Titles:
- Head, Conservation and Research at M
- People
Job Titles:
- Associate Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
O. K. Werckmeister (Ph.D. 1958, Freie Universität Berlin; Mary Jane Crowe Professor Emeritus) has been working on medieval art, the art of the 20th century, and the theory of culture and of art-historical scholarship. His most recent books are Citadel Culture and Icons of the Left. His current research is focused on the political histories of Romanesque art and of European art during the Great Depression, especially the art of the totalitarian regimes in Italy, the Soviet Union, and Germany.
Job Titles:
- Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and
- People
Rebecca Zorach teaches and writes on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Particular interests include print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation, African American artists, and the multiple intersections of art and politics.
Before joining the faculty at Northwestern she taught at the University of Chicago for fourteen years. She has been a visiting faculty member at Yale University, the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales, and Williams College, where she was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor in 2013-14. Her books include Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2005); The Passionate Triangle (University of Chicago Press, 2011); Gold: Nature and Culture with Michael W. Phillips, Jr. (Reaktion Books, 2016); the edited volumes Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (with Amy Bingaman and Lisa Shapiro Sanders, Routledge, 2002), The Idol in the Age of Art (with Michael Cole, Routledge, 2009), Art Against the Law (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014), The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (with Abdul Alkalimat and Romi Crawford, Northwestern University Press, 2017), and Ecologies, Agents, Terrains (with Christopher Heuer, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2018); and the exhibition catalogues Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe 1500-1800 (with Elizabeth Rodini, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2005), The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (University of Chicago Library, 2008), and The Time Is Now! Art Worlds of Chicago's South Side, 1960-1980 (Smart Museum of Art, 2018).
Her book Art for People's Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975 is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2019. She is at work on a new project that will consider the relationship of artistic and political agency to natural and social ecologies. She is a member of Feel Tank Chicago, is on the board of the South Side Community Art Center and South Side Projections, and co-organizes the archive and oral history project Never The Same with Daniel Tucker (never-the-same.org).
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor Emeritus of the Department
Rob Linrothe is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, Evanston. His research is mainly based on fieldwork in Ladakh and Zangskar. He earned a Ph. D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. In 2016-2017 Linrothe received a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies to do fieldwork in eastern India on 8 th to 13 th century sculpture in Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha. His recent books are Seeing Into Stone: Pre-Buddhist Petroglyphs and Zangskar's Early Inhabitants (2016); Visible Heritage: Essays on the Art and Architecture of Greater Ladakh, ed. Rob Linrothe and Heinrich Pöll; and Collecting Paradise: Buddhist Art of Kashmir and its Legacies (2015) (with contributions by Christian Luczanits and Melissa Kerin). Other recent publications include: "Noise Along the Network: A Set of Chinese Ming Embroidered Thangkas in the Indian Himalayas," in Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia (2018); "‘Utterly False, Utterly Undeniable': The Akaniṣṭha Shrine Murals of Takden Phuntsokling Monastery," Archives of Asian Art (2017); "Donor Figures on 9 th-12 th Century Sculpture in Eastern India: A Progress Report." Journal of Bengal Art 22 (2017); "Siddhas and Sociality: A Seventeenth-Century Lay Illustrated Buddhist Manuscript in Kumik Village, Zangskar (A Preliminary Report)" In Visible Heritage (2016); "Mirror Image: Deity and Donor as Vajrasattva" in History of Religions (2014); and "Portraiture on the Periphery: Recognizing Changsem Sherab Zangpo," Archives of Asian Art (2013).
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor
- Professor Emerita of Art History Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities
Hollis Clayson is a historian of modern art who specializes in 19th-century Europe, especially France, and transatlantic exchanges between France and the U.S. Her first book, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, appeared in 1991 (Yale U. Press; reprinted by the Getty, 2003 and Getty Virtual Library, 2014). A co-edited thematic study of painting in the Western tradition, Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained, came out in 2000, and has been translated into six other languages (Watson-Guptill Publications). Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71) was published in 2002 (U. of Chicago Press, paperback 2005). In 2013, she curated the exhibition ELECTRIC PARIS at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA. An expanded version of the exhibition was at the Bruce Museum of Art in Greenwich, CT during the spring and summer of 2016. Her co-edited book (with André Dombrowski), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900, appeared in 2016 (Routledge). Her new book, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (U. of Chicago Press), appeared in 2019. Her current project is The Inescapability of the Eiffel Tower.
Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, The Kaplan Center for the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, the INHA in Paris, The Huntington Library, Columbia University Reid Hall in Paris, and CASVA. Her teaching has also been recognized. She won a WCAS Teaching Award (1987) as an Assistant Professor, was the first and only recipient of the College Art Association's Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award to a Junior Professor (1990), held a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence (1993-96), was the Martin J. and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professor (2004-06), and received the Ver Steeg Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Advising (2016).
She was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in the fall of 2005. She was named Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern in 2006, and served as the (founding) Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities from 2006 to 2013. In 2013-14, she was the Samuel H. Kress Professor in the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art. In early 2014, she was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Culture. In fall of 2015, she was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. In 2017-18, she was Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at CASVA and chercheuse invitée at the INHA (Paris).
Sandra L. Hindman (Ph.D. 1973, Cornell; Professor Emeritus) has taught courses on medieval manuscripts and early printed books, Gothic art, and women in medieval art and society. She co-authored A Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Robert Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Princeton University Press, 1997) and authored Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes(University of Chicago Press, 1994). She has also written Christine de Pizan's "Epistre Othea": Painting and Politics at the Court of Charles VI. She is the editor of Printing and Written Word: The Social History Books, c. 1450-1520. Her most recent book is Manuscript Illumination in the Modern Age, a discussion of the transformation of the appreciation of manuscript illumination from the 18th century to the 1950s in Europe and America. This book, co-authored with Michael Camille, Rowan Watson, and Nina Rowe, accompanied an exhibition at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in 2001.
Job Titles:
- Head
- People
- Professor
- Professor of East Asian Art History and Head of the Institute of East Asian Art History, Centre of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University
Sarah E. Fraser is Professor of East Asian Art History with a focus on Chinese Art and Head of the Institute of East Asian Art History, Centre of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. She was on the Department of Art History faculty at Northwestern University from 1996-2012. Her research interests include historical and theoretical investigations in the History of Asian Art with a concentration on Chinese, Japanese, and Sino-Tibetan painting (sixth through twenty-first centuries), pan-Asian Buddhist wall painting; cognition and the artist's practice; transnational primitive cosmopolitanism(s) developed through archaeological and ethnographic projects in European contexts; pan-Asian colonial subject formation in linguistic and photographic iterations; and neo-colonial Chinese photography.
Her publications include the award-winning Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618-960. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004; Fraser and L. Y. Chieh, eds. Xu Bing: After the Book from the Sky. Singapore: Springer Publications, 2020 and Fraser, Wakita, and Wang, Women Cross Media: East Asian Photography, Prints, and Porcelain from the Dresden State Art Collections. Heidelberg: Arhistoricum.net, Heidelberg University Library, 2021 (in press).
Sarah E. Fraser
Professor of East Asian Art History and Head of the Institute of East Asian Art History, Centre of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University
sarah.fraser@zo.uni-heidelberg.de
Stephen F. Eisenman was born in New York City and educated at SUNY Albany, Williams College and Princeton University where he received his Ph.D. He taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1984-1998, and since then at Northwestern where he is Professor of Art History. From 2008-2010 and 2013-2015 he served as President of the Northwestern Faculty Senate. He is the author of The Temptation of Saint Redon (University of Chicago Press, 1989), Gauguin's Skirt (Thames and Hudson, 1997) and The Abu Ghraib Effect (2007), and is the principal author and editor of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical Edition (Thames and Hudson, fourth edition 2010). Eisenman has curated numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including Paul Gauguin - Artist of Myth and Dream (2007), Design in the Age of Darwin (2008), and The Ecology of Impressionism (2010). Eisenman's most recent books include The Cry of Nature - Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion Books, 2013) and The Ghosts of Our Meat - Sue Coe (New York: DAP, 2013). He is also active in campus, community and state-wide politics. His articles and op-eds concerning torture and prison reform have appeared in Monthly Review and the Chicago Sun-Times. His work with the grass-roots organization Tamms Year Ten, led to the closing in January 2013 of Illinois' most notorious Tamms C-Max prison. He is currently organizing an exhibition at the Block Museum for 2016: William Blake in the Age of Aquarius.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
Yuthika Sharma works on the visual culture of South Asia in the early modern and colonial period. Her research spans a range of topics on colonialism, culture, gender and labour relations. Her publication emerging out of her dissertation research, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857 (co-authored with William Dalrymple, Yale University Press, 2013) focused on artistic identity and knowledge exchange in the long 18th century in Anglo-Mughal India. She has written on portraiture and the practice of proto-colonial survey strategies, the contested art history of ivory souvenirs as well as the role of ‘oriental' commodities in the British domestic sphere. Dr. Sharma has curated a number of exhibitions in the US and the UK and also worked at the British Museum and continues to engage with art historical pedagogy, collecting and curatorial practice. Her research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.
At present, she is writing on historiography and artistic knowledge in the long 18 th century in South Asia before the rise of nationalism. A parallel project considers the repackaging of Mughal manuscripts for Scots in the East India Company and the role of local artists as tastemakers. A new project in development looks at domesticity and public life in 19th century popular culture through the lens of gender and labour relations.
Dr. Sharma's Introduction to Asian Art course has been featured in The Daily Northwestern as a "compelling" course for the Literature and Fine Arts foundational discipline requirement. To learn more about her academic journey, please read her faculty spotlight.