Dear Friends,

This quarterly edition of the History of Art and Architecture Newsletter marks an exciting moment in our department's history. After more than two years of temporary residence in Ellison Hall, we are celebrating our return to the newly refurbished and earthquake-retrofitted Arts Building.

We are in the midst of wonderful changes, with new appointments and curricular initiatives in progress. We made a new hire in Contemporary Art History this year, welcoming Professor Jenni Sorkin to our faculty. We are also delighted to have Distinguished Fulbright Chair in Modern German Studies, Professor Sigrid Hofer in the department during Fall and Winter quarters, In addition, Visiting Assistant Professor Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz joined us for a two-year appointment in Japanese art history and visual culture. We are launching a new Undergraduate Emphasis in Museum Studies, to be followed by a Master's Program in Critical Curatorial Studies.

Fall 2013 has been a flurry of activity. We kicked off the year with a thematic Beginning-of-the-Year Reception on Oct 4: Kitsch-n-Kunst, made possible by the creativity, artistic and culinary labor of our graduate students and faculty. Our 2013-14 History of Art and Architecture Lectures Series--Owning Otherness--began with a stimulating talk by Prof. Krista Thompson (Northwestern University) on mid-century modernism and the politics of blackness. In the first talk of the Faculty Lecture Series, Ignacio Adriasola gave a thought-provoking exposé on post-war Japanese art and photography. We are preparing to celebrate the holiday season, our return to the Arts Building, and the Museum Studies Emphasis Launch with a Holiday Reception on Dec 6.

I hope you will join us at departmental events, and keep in touch as we shape our successful undergraduate and graduate programs to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Please save the date for the UCSB Reception at the College Art Association Meeting in Chicago on Thursday Feb 13, 2014! I look forward to seeing you there.

With best wishes for the holidays-
Swati

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

Prof. Jenni Sorkin (Ph.D., Yale University) joins us an Assistant Professor with specialization in contemporary art, material culture and craft, art criticism, and feminist and queer theory. Read more about Jenni

Prof. Sigrid Hofer, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Modern German Studies, is visiting us from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany for Fall 2013 and Winter 2014. She is teaching courses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German art history and historiography.

Visiting Assistant Professor Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz joins us with a two-year appointment in modern and contemporary Japanese art history and theory.

"The Zodiac of Wit: Peter Meller and the Graphic Imagination," an exhibition of drawings, prints, and other objects by former UCSB Art History Professor Peter Meller, and organized by Prof. Robert Williams, was on view at the Art Design & Architecture Museum on campus and at the Jane Deering Gallery in downtown Santa Barbara in the summer of 2012. Prof. Robert Williams, who also wrote a companion volume. A version of the show was held at Gallery 27 in London in April, 2013.

Read more about Peter Meller's work -- Read more about the exhibition

The exhibition Conjuring India: British Views of the Subcontinent, 1780-1870, curated by Mira Rai Waits, Ph.D. candidate, examines representations of colonial-era India with examples from books and illustrations published in the 18th and 19th centuries from the collections of Sara Miller McCune and the UCSB Library. It is on display in Special Collections until December 15.

Read more about the exhibition here.

Thanks to a generous private donor, Prof. Volker M. Welter continues the successful architecture field trip program. In conjunction with Prof. Welter's class on "Revival Styles in Southern California" a group of students traveled in late May 2013 to Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, to study the new Mediterranean revival style chapel and an older Spanish-colonial revival style library. The group then visited the modern library at California State University Channel Islands, Camarillo, which Foster + Partners added a few years ago to the historic Spanish revival style campus.

• Holiday Reception and Museum Studies Emphasis Launch: Friday Dec 6, 2013, 2-5pm, Rm 1332 Arts.
• History of Art and Architecture Lecture Series, Owning Otherness .
     Thursday, February 27: "Concrete Modernities," by Professor Dell Upton, Art History, UCLA
     Thursday, 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
     Thursday, May 22: Roundtable with participants TBA
• History of Art and Architecture Faculty Lectures:
     Thursday, Nov 14: Ignacio Adriasola Muñoz, "Melancholy sites"
     Thursday, March 13: Sigrid Hofer, "Pictures that do not exist"
• Save the Day!  UCSB Reception at the College Art Association in Chicago on Thursday, Feb 13, 2014 at 6pm. Location TBA. Please RSVP Ali Mastain at amastain@hfa.ucsb.edu by Fri Jan 31, 2014.

Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Peter C. Sturman, The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China (Santa Barbara: The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2012).

Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Dana Leibsohn, eds., Seeing Across Cultures: Visuality in the Early Modern Period (Ashgate Press, 2012).

Sylvester Ogbechie, Making History: The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2011).

Carole Paul, ed. The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th and Early-19th-Century Europe (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012).

Sylvester Ogbechie, ed. Artists of Nigeria (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2012).

• On September 28, Jenni Sorkin gave the keynote at the symposium, ReThinking Craft, organized in conjunction with the exhibition, Crafting a Continuum, curated by Peter Held, at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe. In October, she presented a paper at the Fifth Annual Black Mountain College Conference in Asheville, North Carolina. The conference's theme was Craft+Design. In November, she gave an invited lecture at the American Ceramics Circle conference at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and conducted an invited conversation with the American artist Elaine Reichek at The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of Cloth symposium at The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her recent publications include, "The Pottery Happening: Examining M.C. Richards' Clay Things to Touch...(1958)," Getty Research Journal, vol 5 (Spring 2013), 195-202.
• Prof. Volker Welter was invited to present his research on the Tremaine Houses in Santa Barbara at the 12th International Bauhaus Colloquium at Weimar. His article "Therapeutic Frontiers: The Tremaine Houses in Santa Barbara" was published in the new scholarly journal, Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism (October 2013).
  In early June, Prof. Welter presented an invited lecture at the Earth Perfect? symposium, University of Delaware, on the influence of Richard Neutra's experience of the battlefields of the Great War on his mid-20th-century domestic architecture in Southern California. This paper will be published in early 2014.
• Prof. Ulrich Keller published two articles this year, the first titled, "The Iconic Turn in American Political Culture: Speech Performance for the Gilded- Age Picture Press," Word & Image 29, no. 1 (Jan. 2013), 1-39, an essay about the replacement of programmatic argument by images of smiling and hand-shaking electoral candidates in American political life, as the picture press rose to prominence after the Civil War.
  The second is a book chapter about the transformation of photo-reportage from an aesthetically bland news discourse into a hybrid fusion of news, commercial advertisement, political propaganda and avant-garde design, in the first decades of the twentieth century: "Fotografie und Begehren: Der Triumph der Bildreportage im Medienwettbewerb der Zwischenkriegszeit," in Fotografien im 20. Jahrhundert. Verbreitung und Vermittlung, ed. A. Ramsbrock, A. Vowinckel, M. Zierenberg, (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 129-174.
• During her tenure as Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) and JSAH Online, Prof. Swati Chattopadhyay had undertaken the publication of special issues. The recent Special Issue on War Landscapes, JSAH 73, no 3 (Sep 2013) addresses the growing interest among architectural historians in defense architecture and the landscape of violent conflict.
  Prof. Chattopadhyay's lectures this year included "Urban Itineraries and Peripheral Spaces," at the Penn Humanities Forum; the Benjamin West Memorial Lecture at Swarthmore College, titled "City and Country in South Asia," and "A Geography of Small Spaces," at the University of Kentucky's Social Theory Seminar Series. Prof. Chattopadhyay contributed an essay to an anthology published in conjunction with the recreation of a 1922 exhibition held in Calcutta that showcased the avant-garde art of the Bauhaus and Calcutta: "Spaces of Conversation: the Avant-garde in 1920s Calcutta," in Transcultural Avant-Garde Laboratory: the Bauhaus in Calcutta, 1922, ed. Regina Bittner and Kathrin Rhomberg (2013), 162-171.
• Peter Sturman published an article titled "'Summoning the Recluse' - The Relevance of an Ancient Theme in 17th Century China," Orientations 44, no. 2 (March 2013), 104-112.

• Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (Ph.D., 2005) has published her first book, In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling's Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands (2013). The book, published by Brepols in Belgium, is the fifth volume in the series Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation.
• Noa Turel (Ph.D., 2012) accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Turel spent last academic year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the the Getty Research Institute, continuing research based on her dissertation "Living Color: The Animation Paradigm of Pictorial Realism 1350-1550."
• Cody Hartley (Ph.D., 2005) was named Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe in April 2013. Hartley previously acted as an assistant curator and later as Director of Gifts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
• Emily Engel (Ph.D., 2009) accepted a position at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx where she will be chair of the department and responsible for starting up an art history major.
• Amy Buono (Ph.D., 2007) spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
• Antoniette Gugliemo (Ph.D., 2008) is the Assistant Director of the Getty Leadership Institute, Claremont Graduate University (GLI at CGU), an international source of continuing professional development for current and future museum leaders. She serves as the chief administrator and communications manager who works closely with CGU staff and faculty.
• Austen B. Bailey (Ph.D., 2009) joined the Peabody Essex Museum as George Putnam Curator of American Art last year.
• Katie Papineau (Ph.D., 2013) joined the College of Architecture, Visual Arts and Design, California Baptist University in Riverside, CA, as Assistant Professor in History of Architecture this Fall.
• George Flaherty (Ph.D., 2011), Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, along with his colleague Professor Andrea Giunta, was awarded the Connective Art Histories Initiative Grant, 2012-15, from the Getty Foundation.