Winter 2014 - Message from the Chair

Dear Friends,

The department’s Holiday Reception last December was a great success: Chancellor Henry Yang, Mrs. Dilling Yang, and David Marshall, Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, joined the department’s friends, students, staff, and faculty for the “soft” launch of a new Undergraduate Emphasis in Museum Studies, and our return to the revamped Arts Building. Graduate students, led by AHGSA (Art History Graduate Student Association) co-chairs Erin Travers and Diva Zumaya had decked the reception venue in a wonderful holiday theme. Thanks to the labors of our Undergraduate Program Manager Ali Mastain, the department’s Curriculum Committee chaired by Prof. Jeanette Peterson, and the Director of the Museum Studies Emphasis, Prof. Carole Paul, plans for the new emphasis were in place. Prof. Paul presented the goals of the emphasis and its interdisciplinary focus, followed by a brief address by Chancellor Yang and Dean Marshall. We expect to offer courses in the emphasis next year.

It was a pleasure to see our alumni and friends at the UCSB Reception in Chicago during the College Arts Association (CAA) Annual Meeting in February. We celebrated the recent CAA publication awards of our faculty: Prof. Peter C Sturman’s exhibition catalogue, The Artful Recluse, that received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections and Exhibition; and Prof. Jeanette Peterson’s Millard Meiss Publication Grant for her book, Visualizing Guadalupe (see details below).

As we look forward to Spring break, we are planning two important departmental events: the Graduate Student Symposium organized by our department’s graduate students on Sat April 26, 2014, and the Annual Awards Ceremony on Fri June 13, 2014. We are very pleased to add two new awards to the roster of grants made to our students, thanks to the generosity of Howard C. Fenton. The Howard C. Fenton Award for Undergraduate Research will recognize the best Honor’s Thesis among our majors, and the Howard C. Fenton Award for Graduate Research will be awarded to the best Master’s Thesis in the department.

Please save these dates, and I look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes,
Swati

Swati Chattopadhyay
Professor and Chair
Editor, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and JSAH Online

• Forthcoming:
  
• History of Art and Architecture Lecture Series, Owning Otherness.
• May 8: "Away from chinoiserie and japonisme: New Approaches to European Collections of Asian Art in the Nineteenth Century," by Dr. Ting Chang, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
• May 22: Roundtable with participants TBA.
• The Graduate Student Association Alumni Panel will take place on Fri April 4, 12:00-3:00, Room 1332.
• The Grad Panel will take place on Wed April 16th, 5:00-6:00, Room 1332, and will answer questions for undergraduates considering grad school.
• The Architecture Portfolio Workshop will take place on Sat April 26th, 1:00-3:00 and Sat May 17th 1:00-3:00.
• The 39th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium will take place on Sat April 26. It is entitled Documents of Culture/Documents of Barbarism.
• Recent:
  
• January 21: Lecture by Dr. Raymond Neutra
• February 19: Museums Career Panel for undergraduates
• February 19: Lecture by Eiman Elgewely: "Towards Virtual and Real Museum Extended Interaction."
• February 20: Lecture by E. Randol Schoenberg: "The Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art: The Bloch-Bauer Klimt Paintings."
• On view through March 24: The Art History Association exhibition per*cep*tion: the study of subjectivity and objectivity in cooperation with Left Coast Books

Read more about all upcoming Events here

• Ann Jensen Adams, "Temporality and the Seventeenth-century Dutch Portrait," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol. 5:2 (2013).
• Bruce Robertson wrote two essays for exhibition catalogues this fall.... Read more here
• Volker M. Welter published an essay on the idea of the region as a city by the Scottish biologist and city designer Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) in archithese (vol. 43, issue 6/2013), the leading Swiss international thematic review for architecture.
  The British online magazine Berfrois - Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters recently published an article by Prof. Welter on the private home of the Hungarian-American psychoanalyst Franz Alexander... Read more here
  
• Sylvester Ogbechie was an invited speaker to Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics, late 19th to Early 21st Centuries, Free University, Berlin, December 5 -7, 2013.... Read more here.
• Swati Chattopadhyay published an essay “Visualizing the Body Politic,” in Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman eds. Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (Indiana University Press, 2014). Prof. Chattopadhyay also contributed a state-of-the-field essay, “Architectural History and Spatial Imagination,” in Perspectives.... Read more here.

• Staci Gem Scheiwiller (Ph.D., 2009), Assistant Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art History at California State University, Stanislaus, has published her second book, the edited Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity (2013).
• Lisa Volpe (Ph.D., 2013) is currently Curator at the Wichita Art Museum.
• Charlene G. Garfinkle (Ph.D., 1996) was invited to contribute an essay to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: The Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree Collection in Context... Read more here