Dear All,

This has been a year of many transitions for the Department of History of Art and Architecture: beginnings and endings and transformations. We welcomed Prof. Alicia Boswell into the department as our specialist in the Ancient Americas; we are in the midst of celebrating Prof. Bruce Robertson’s retirement after 28 years in the department (Bruce, we hardly knew ye!); and we congratulate Prof. Claudia Moser on her promotion with tenure to the rank of Associate Professor. Judi Haskell, our fearless leader (aka Director of the Arts Administrative Support Center) is also taking a well-earned retirement from UCSB. Our (and my) sincere thanks for everything she has done for the department over the years. Well done all!

After becoming a rather top-heavy department in recent years, there has been a lot of discussion of bringing in some new blood. Not to be limited by already being two of our most recent hires, Profs. Alicia Boswell and Claudia Moser took the talk of needing more junior colleagues to heart and have added J.J. (bottom left) and Allegra (bottom right) (respectively) to our little community. Congratulations to them and to Chris and Aaron (also respectively)! Again: well done!

Our process of innovation and upgrading of HAA’s instructional and spaces has continued apace, with the conversion of the remainder of the former Slide Library into the Center for Object Based Research and Learning (COBRAL for short, since UCSB does not have enough acronyms). Our sincere thanks to Jackie Spafford and Christine Fritsch for their heroic efforts in managing this transition, to the museum staff for their consultation, as well as to Dean John Majewski for the financial support that made COBRAL possible, and to Assistant Dean Julie Cunningham for her invaluable advice and guidance. The old darkroom, for any of you who can remember that far back, is now a climate controlled secure vault, which enables us to teach classes with materials borrowed from the AD&AM (Art, Design & Architecture Museum, formerly known as the UAM) for the quarter. Prof. Volker Welter and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Dan Baciu have led the way in running the first courses in the new space. Strange how teaching history of art and architecture from original objects can become cutting edge! As long as we are on the topic of hands-on learning, Prof. Claudia Moser inaugurated the campus’s first archaeological mock trench, adding another exciting instructional tool to our kit.

Physical facilities are crucial for teaching, but so is the curriculum. Since our last newsletter, HAA has added two new minors, both of which are directed toward providing non-academic career tracks for UCSB’s undergraduates. In Fall 2019, we inaugurated our new Museum Studies minor degree, which complements the existing Museum Studies Emphasis within our department's B.A. As of the release of this newsletter, we’ve just gotten word that approval has been granted for another new departmental minor, in Architecture and Urbanism. My thanks to our Program Manager, Savannah Parison, for successfully shepherding these proposals through the administrative thickets of the approval process.

This year’s HAA lecture series, ably organized by Prof. Claudia Moser, was on “Games,” and was designed as a lead-up to what will possibly be a third new minor, in the Visual and Material Culture of Games. Our first speakers was Prof. Manuel Aguilar-Moreno (California State University, Los Angeles), who gave an entertaining account of his fieldwork researching “Ulama: The Mesoamerican Ballgame Still Played Today.” Prof. Skip Rizzo (University of Southern California), discussed the rehabilitative promises of new technologies in his talk, “Is Clinical Virtual Reality Ready for Primetime?” The field of early-modern art history has been especially active in exploring games as an aspect of visual culture, and were ably represented by our last two speakers in the series. Prof. Jessen Kelly (University of Utah) turned to topics still near and dear to many academics in her paper, “Perilous Vessels: Dice Games and Drinking Games in the Dutch Republic.” Our final speaker was Prof. Bret Rothstein (Indiana University, Bloomington), one of our own graduate alumni, who explained the rules of the game in his paper, “The Cheat, The Spoilsport, and The Virtuoso.”

We are looking forward to many more changes in the coming year. Stay tuned for an announcement about the outcome of our latest search in Colonial to Contemporary Latin American Art; we wll be running another search in the coming year in Global Early Modern.

With best wishes to one and all for a glorious summer and a better 2019-20! Mark Mark A. Meadow Professor and Chair

We were pleased to welcome Dr. Alicia Boswell to the department in July 2018. Dr. Boswell is an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in the art and archaeology of the ancient Americas. Her research focuses on understanding the relationships between and within culture groups of the Andes through the material record. Her current project examines the production and display of elite regalia of the Moche culture from the north coast of Peru (AD 200–800) and its implications for understanding regional identities and sociopolitical relationships throughout the Moche world.

She has more than a decade of experience carrying out archaeological fieldwork in Peru and also has worked on archaeological projects in Mexico and California. Collaboration with modern communities in the Andes is an equally important part of her research. She has a decade of experience carrying out community-based heritage preservation projects in Peru through Mobilizing Opportunities for Community Heritage Empowerment (MOCHE, Inc.). One of her long-term research goal is to integrate heritage conservation more directly into academic research.

Boswell received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2016. From 2016 –2018 she was the Andrew W. Mellon “Cultures of Conservation” Fellow at Bard Graduate Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, and UC San Diego.

Professor Claudia Moser created a mock archaeological trench in the courtyard of the Arts Building with help from some colleagues (L to R: Alumna Shannon Gilmore, Moser, Professor Alicia Boswell and Professor Jenni Sorkin).

The trench will be used for teaching techniques of archaeological excavation to undergraduates in a variety of lower and upper division classes.

Click to see a large version of this photo

Congratulations to our 2018 graduates!

Clockwise from left: Melina Gooray, Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Prof. Laurie Monahan, Shannon Lieberman, Prof. Ann Jensen Adams, Erin Travers, Brianna Simmons, and Prof. Jenni Sorkin (not pictured: Julianne Gavino, Mary McGuire, Suzanne van de Meerendonk, Anna Myjak-Pycia, and Diva Zumaya).

Click to see a large version of this photo

The Image Resource Center underwent a huge makeover in the past year. After the complete move from analog teaching, the space was underused and ready for a new purpose. Curator Jackie Spafford and Assistant Curator Christine Fritsch cleared out the last of the massive 35mm slide collection, a bittersweet experience, to make room for new initiatives.

The first stage, in 2017, involved dividing the room with a modular wall (itself a platform for display) to create the Digital Image Lab (DIL), which has been in constant use with discussion groups, talks, online meetings, and more. It was home to the Mapping series this year, which will continue in 2019-20 with some exciting events. The second phase, the Center for Object Based Research and Learning (COBRAL) was just completed this January. Both rooms are in high demand, and with the flexibility of the rolling furniture, can be set up in minutes for a variety of functions.

Below, L to R: Professor Keith Clarke, Geography, presenting How to Make a Map in the DIL; Dr. Dan Baciu's 143F class in COBRAL; and the set-up for Professor Volker Welter's 136M class.

Professor Ann Jensen Adams published the article “Hiding in plain sight:  textual insights into market analysis and attribution of portraits by Govert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol,” in the anthology of essays, Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck:  New Research, to accompany a major exhibition of the artists at the Amsterdam Museum and Rembrandt House Museum.  She also delivered the paper Borrowed identities, name-dropping, and “public displays of connection” at the invitational conference “Reputation Cultures in Early Modern Europe,” held August 27-28, 2018 at the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), Amsterdam.

Professor Mark Meadow participated on Friday March 1, 2019 in the Seminar for European Art at the Newberry Library in Chicago, in which scholars discuss their current research in relation to primary sources held in the Newberry’s collections. Mark’s presentation was “Across Space and Time: Imagining Historical and Cultural Distance in the Sixteenth Century.”  On March 22, 2019, Mark delivered a paper on “Envisioning Historical Distance in Cornelis van Dalem’s Landscape with the Dawn of Civilization,” at the 2018 Lovis Corinth Colloquium IX, Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500-1700, at Emory University. With Professor Andrew Morrall, Mark co-organized the first of three symposia on “Prudence, Techne, and the Practice of Good Governance in the Early-Modern Kunstkammer”  on April 12, 2019 at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. Mark’s paper for the New York symposium was “Quanta prudentia et usus administrandæ reipublicæ: Mylaeus and Quiccheberg on the Utility of Techne.” The subsequent two symposia are to be held at UCSB and at the University of Oregon. Mark also delivered the Edwin L. Weisl endowed Lecture in the Arts at Carleton College on May 9, 2019, on the subject of “Technological Primitivism: Cornelis van Dalem’s Landscape with the Dawn of Civilization and the Question of Historical Distance.”

Professor Claudia Moser and Writing Program Lecturer Christian Thomas just received a $94,000 grant from UCSB's Innovative Learning Technology Initiative to develop an interactive game-based course called Rome: The Game.

Professor Sylvester Ogbechie was elected to the Executive Board of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2018. He published a book chapter titled “Art, African Identities and Colonialism” (in Martin S. Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola, The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History (Volume I), New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018: 439-450) and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Rethinking African Art History: Indigenous Arts, Modernity, and Discourses of the Contemporary. Professor Ogbechie presented the Burke Lecture at Indiana University (April 11, 2018), the Program of African Studies 70th Anniversary Lecture at Northwestern University (April 25, 2018), the Distinguished Guest Lecture at Florida State University, Talahassee (Sept. 9, 2018), and was an Invited Speaker to the Deep Time and Crisis Conference at theHaus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin, Germany (May 26, 2018). Ogbechie runs the Foto-Factory-Lagos annual workshop on contemporary photography in Lagos Nigeria (2018 version completed, 2019 version pending), and remains the Editor-in-Chief of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, which he founded in 2007.

Professor Emerita Jeanette Peterson's Florentine Codex Initiative has just been awarded a grant of $1.9 million from the Getty Trust.

Adjunct Professor Sven Spieker edited Destruction (MIT Press, 2017), a volume of essays exploring contemporary artists' engagement with destruction.

Professor Miriam Wattles wrote "Meiji Daughters: Their Stuff and Fancy in Brocade Pictures, 1870s-1880s," and was interviewed by Tristan Grunow for a podcast (April 19, 2019), both for the Meiji at 150 Project at the University of British Columbia.  She collaborated on “A Call to End Human Rights Abuses at Japanese Immigrant Detention Centers: Twenty-five years of Grassroots Advocacy at Ushiku Detention Center” in The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 5, Number 4.

Professor Volker M. Welter’s entry on Richard Neutra’s famous mid-twentieth century Kaufmann Desert House in Palm Springs was published in SAH Archipedia, the online version of the book series The Buildings of the United States.  Professor Welter also contributed a chapter on the concept of “One World” to  the Companion to Environmental Studies (ed. by Noel Castree, et. al , Routledge 2018), and the Western Humanities Reviews published his essay “Restoration within Reach: The Miles C. Bates House, Palm Desert, California” in its Fall 2018 issue. In March 2018 Prof Welter delivered a paper on Two Jewish Country Houses from the 1920s near Berlin at the workshop ‘The Jewish Country House’, organized by The Oxford Research Center in the Humanities, University of Oxford, and Waddesdon Manor.  In May he presented a paper on “Rebuilding, Recovery, Reconceptualization: Modern Architecture and the Great War” at the International Colloquium “Revival after the Great War: Repair, Rebuild, Remember”.  The event commemorated the destruction of the City of Leuven, Belgium, during the Great War and was organized by the City of Leuven and the KU Leuven University.  In June Professor Welter was invited to talk about “Out of the Battlefields of the Great War: Modern Space as Extended Environment” at the Annual Symposium “Architecture, the Built Environment, and the Aftermath of the First World War” held by the Society of Architectural Historian of Great Britain (SAHGB) in London.  In October a paper on “Echoes from the Great War: Richard Neutra’s Domestic Architecture in 1940s Southern California”, which was delivered at the conference  “America in the Trenches - A Centennial Exploration of America’s Involvement in the Great War”  at CSU Bakersfield, rounded off Professor Welter’s participation in World War I centennial events.  In November he was back in London speaking at the conference “Sites of Interchange: Modernism, Politics, and Culture in Britain and Germany, 1919-1951” at the Courtauld Institute about “Zehlendorf in London, Hiddensee in Walberswick, but nothing left in Berlin? The Double Exile of Ernst L. Freud”, the architect son of Sigmund Freud. In Winter quarter 2019 Professor Welter’s class on Revival Styles in Southern California (Arthi 136M) inaugurated teaching in the department’s new Center for Object Based Research and Learning in the IRC (see above).  For several weeks students handled, studied, and wrote about original architectural drawings from the holdings of the Architecture & Design Collection (ADC) of the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum on campus. In order to strengthen further use of the world class holdings of the ADC, Professor Welter was also appointed as its first Faculty Curator. In March 2019 Professor Welter participated at the Maison Française, University of Oxford, in a conference on British, American, and French Photobooks by delivering a paper on “Photobooks and the Architectural Imagination of Southern California”.  In April 2019, an invitation by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas, Dallas, allowed Professor Welter to present a workshop talk entitled “Reliving World War I in Southern California: Richard Neutra’s mid-20th century Domestic Architecture and the Modern Landscape of War”. 

Professor Richard Wittman has been awarded a Wallace Fellowship from Harvard University's Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy. He will be there from January through June 2020, working on a new project entitled, "From Universal Ideal to Local Tradition: The Architecture of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Papal Rome."

Sarah Bane received the Balch Fellowship from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Summer Research Fellowship from The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley in 2018 and the W.M. Keck Foundation Fellowship from The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in 2019 to support continuing research on her dissertation titled, "Join the Club: Regional Print Clubs in the United States during the Interwar Period." Sarah also curated and wrote the accompanying publication for the fall 2018 exhibition  Prints!: The Joan and Stuart Levin Collection at the Art Design and Architecture museum. Her conversation with the collector can be seen here. Sarah was recently appointed as an officer to the Association of Print Scholars where she will serve as the Workshop Coordinator. In the fall of 2019, Sarah will begin a twelve-month appointment as the Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

Laura diZerega received a Getty Graduate Internship in Digital and Print Publications, Getty Publications (September 2018-September 2019), as well as a Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship (Winter 2018).

Shannon Gilmore received the Dean's Prize Teaching Fellowship for 2018-2019, and in Spring 2019 taught an undergraduate seminar in the department, Body and Religion in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.

Marta Faust published an article, "Eyed Awry": Blind Spots and Memoria in the Zimmern Anamorphosis," in the online Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (Summer 2018).

Holly Gore presented “Building Community: Molly Gregory, Woodworking, and Pedagogy at Black Mountain College” at the symposium, Shared Ground: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Craft at Bard Graduate Center and Museum of Art and Design.

Matthew Limb has been awarded a 2019 Craft Research Fund Project Grant from the Center for Craft in support of his dissertation, "'Living on the Edge of Survival': Ceramics and Ecology in the American West, 1961-2000."

Yun-Chen (Clio) Lu has received the 2019-20 Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange; the 2019-2020 Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Asian Studies Doctoral Grant; the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Research Travel Grant; the Heidelberg-Getty Dissertation Workshop and a European-U.K. Research Travel Stipend (funded by the Getty Foundation); the UCSB Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship; and the UCSB Humanity & Social Sciences Research Grant.

Sophia Quach McCabe has been awarded the Renaissance Society of America Diversity Grant in support of her participation at the 65th annual RSA conference in Toronto. Her talk, "Production of Knowledge through the Techne of Hans Rottenhammer's Copper Paintings," is part of the series Beyond Techne and Metatechne: Sessions in Honor of Robert Williams. As an officer of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, Sophia is co-organizing the conference's annual meeting and chairing two sessions on March 9, 2019 at the Huntington Library.

Mary Okin gave two talks as part of “Thiebaud Study Day” in March 2018 which accompanied the opening of the retrospective "Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968" at UC Davis's Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. This year she presented a paper at CAA in New York in 2019, "'A real look at ourselves for what we are': Wayne Thiebaud's Electric Chair Paintings," as part of the "Object Biographies: Downstream Histories and Unanticipated Artwork Conversations" panel. And in March 2019 she attended a Whistler Object Study Workshop at the Smithsonian's Freer Sackler Art Gallery.

Rachel Winter is the recipient of the UCSB Graduate Division Student Internship Fellowship.  The fellowship will support her summer internship with the Art of the Middle East Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, allowing her to work with the collection of contemporary art from the Middle East, which is the largest in the country.

Amy Buono (Ph.D. 2007) joined Chapman University as Assistant Professor in the Wikinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in 2018.

Cynthia Canejo (Ph.D. 2005), UNC Asheville Associate Professor of Art History, was the Curator for The Decisive Dream exhibitionfeaturing the photographs of Cuban-American artist Gory (Rogelio López Marín), Aug. 24-Oct. 5, 2018, in the S. Tucker Cooke Gallery, Owen Hall.  As both a distinguished photographer and photorealist painter (who came to the U.S. in 1991), Gory is one of the principal artists from Latin America.  His presentation last Spring at UNCA received such a great response that an exhibition of his photographs was arranged for Fall 2018.  Gory was a 2017 recipient of a prestigious Pollack/Krasner Foundation grant and his works are in the permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Havana’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. 

Emily Engel (Ph.D. 2009) (founding associate editor), along with Charlene Villaseñor Black (founding editor-in-chief), announces the launch of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing the most current international research on the visual culture of Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, as well as that created in diaspora. The journal aims to approach ancient, colonial, modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx visual culture from a range of interdisciplinary methodologies and perspectives. More on Emily's role.

George Flaherty (Ph.D. 2011), Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, published “Chicano Over Asphalt: Street Photography in Global Los Angeles,” in La Raza, edited by Colin Gunckel (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2018). He was invited to lecture at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City and the University of Rochester; served on a jury for an art installation memorializing the 1968 student movement in Mexico City at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco; and joined the board of the Society of Architectural Historians. He also was a co-convener, with Robin Greeley (University of Connecticut) of Precarity, Resistance and Contemporary Art from the Americas, a colloquiumat the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Alison Fraunhar (Ph.D. 2005) is co-curating an artist exchange and exhibition (along with Cesareo Moreno from the national Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and Raquel Carrera, independent curator, Havana, Cuba) entitled "Cross Currents".  Cross Currents brought Latinx artists in Chicago and artists in Havana on visits to each other’s cities.  The exhibition that came out of the artist exchange opens at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago in July, 2019, and travels to the Centro de Desarrollo de Arte Visual in Havana in January 2020.

Cody Hartley (Ph.D. 2005) has been named Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Hartley has been at the O’Keeffe since 2013 and was most recently Senior Director, Collections and Interpretation, and Acting Director.

In 1997, there was no art history department at Mt. San Antonio College and virtually no program — only an “art appreciation” course and the two-semester survey. Cristina Hernandez (UCSB MA 1994) was hired in 1997 and immediately set about expanding the program, modeling it on the types of lower-division courses at UCSB and other UC campuses. The art history program grew from three intro courses to eleven courses, spanning geographical space and time, as well as a number of paired Honors Program and online courses.  Recently (2017), Ellen Caldwell (UCSB MA 2006) joined our team, expanding our online and digital presence and adding a “World Art and Visual Culture” course to the department's offerings. In April 2019, Dr. Mary McGuire (UCSB PhD 2018) was offered a tenure-track position and will join our ranks in Fall 2019, bringing her expertise in modern and contemporary visual culture and museum studies.

Barbara A. Kaminska (Ph.D. 2014), will be publishing her book Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Religious Art for the Urban Community with Brill Publishers, Leiden, The Netherlands. The release date for Barbara’s book is September, 2019.

Joy Kunz (Ph.D. 2004) is a full time faculty in Art History at Santa Barbara City College, and just finished her first sabbatical in 2017-18 with a focus on Inclusion and Access in curriculum.

Daniel Novak (B.A. 2006) joined the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California as Assistant Professor of Clinical Medical Education in the Department of Medical Education in mid-2018. In 2019, his work on Digital Health received an Innovations in Medical Education grant from the American Medical Association (AMA), his research on video-based reflective practice won the 2019 Computer Research in Medical Education Award from the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), and he has been nominated for the AAMC's 2019 Research in Medical Education New Investigator Award for his research on curriculum renewal in medical education.

Catha Paquette (Ph.D. 2002), professor at the School of Art, California State University, Long Beach, published “Museo Nacional de Historia: David Alfaro Siqueiros: Del Porfiriato a la Revolución, 1957–1966” in Murales CdMx (Mexico City: Cooperativa la Joplin, 2018), and “The Dictator and The Dictator Returns: Hildegarde Duane, David Lamelas, and the Video Art Scene in Southern California” in David Lamelas: A Life of Their Own (exhibition catalogue, Long Beach: University Art Museum, CSULB, and Buenos Aires: MALBA–Fundación Constantini, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2017). She also published the essay  “Museo Nacional de Historia: David Alfaro Siqueiros: Del Porfiriato a la Revolución, 1957–1966,” in Murales CdMx, ed. Ana Garduño Ortega (Mexico City: Cooperativa la Joplin, 2018), 66–68.

Emily J. Peters (Ph.D. 2005) has, with Julian Brooks (J. Paul Getty Museum), co-curated the exhibition Michelangelo: Mind of the Master, featuring 28 of Michelangelo’s drawings from the Teylers Museum in the Netherlands, exhibited in the United States as a group for the first time. The exhibition will be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from September 22, 2019-January 5, 2020 and will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum February 25-June 7, 2019. A catalogue written by Peters, Brooks, Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken (with contributions by Edina Adam) accompanies the exhibition. Emily is Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Gary Sampson (Ph.D. 1991), Professor of Art and Design History and Chair of Liberal Arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art, is working on a book-length project involving the representation of city environments and the complexity of urban design related to areas undergoing serious redevelopment.  He recently returned to London and Rotterdam to research architecture and photography collections in both cities, and to photograph the vicinity comprising London’s St Pancras and King’s Cross Rail Stations and the British Library, and Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid.  He also presented a related paper in November for the annual conference of AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, and Society; co-hosted with the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative), based on his studies of the urban designer Kevin Lynch and master plans for University Circle since the 1950s: “Dreams of the Emergent City in the Re-Visioning of Cleveland’s University Circle.”   

In November 2018, John Senseney (Ph.D. 2002) accepted a spousal hire offer that took him from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to a new full-time, tenured, and split appointment at the rank of Associate Professor at the University of Arizona. His tenure home is in the Department of History in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, where he normally teaches two courses per year. The remainder of his appointment is in the School of Art, where he would normally teach two courses per year in the Art History Division, but he is released from of teaching art history courses indefinitely in order to serve as Dean's Fellow for Research in the College of Fine Arts. 

Briana Simmons (Ph.D. 2017), accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Art History position at Santa Monica College in California. She is the co-PI on the digital humanities project Mapping and Preserving the Hidden Histories of Santa Monica, which recently won a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant.

Sarah Thompson (Ph.D. 2009) is an associate professor of art history at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her essay “Building Brick City: The Design of RIT’s Henrietta Campus” came out in Transforming the Landscape: Fifty Years on the New RIT Campus (RIT Press) this fall. She also co-edited The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture with Jennifer Feltman (Routledge, 2019).

The department was sad to learn that Dr. Gavin Townsend (Ph.D. 1986) passed away after a brief illness. Gavin was a student of David Gebhard and wrote his dissertation on "The Tudor House in America: 1890-1930." Immediately after graduation, Gavin moved to Tennessee, where he taught as professor of art history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) until his death. Our thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues. (Obituary notice on the Society of Architectural Historians website.)

Erin Travers (Ph.D. 2018) has received the 2019-2020 Getty Graduate Internship in Philanthropy with the Getty Foundation. Her article, “Jacob van der Gracht’s Anatomie for Artists,” will appear in the 68th volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for Art History/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek (August 2019). She has been a lecturer in the HAA Department this year, and for her 187Z seminar she and her students visited the exhibition, To Rome and Back: Individualism and Authority in Art 1500-1800 (LACMA) for a tour led by Curator and Department Head of European Painting and Sculpture, and American Art, Leah Lehmbeck.

Noa Turel (Ph.D. 2012) has this year been in residence as Herodotus Fund Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she been working on a book manuscript titled Ingenious Secrets: Renaissance Painter-Engineers and the Rise of Technologized Europe.

ShiPu Wang’s (Ph.D. 2006) second book, The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa, has won the 2018 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Book Prize. The prize capped off an eventful year: he was promoted to Full Professor and awarded the Coats Family Endowed Chair in the Arts at UC Merced; joined the editorial board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s American Art; and was featured in a symposium celebrating the publication of the 50th-anniversary special volume for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The touring exhibition he curated for UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum, Chiura Obata: An American Modern, is now at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan, after a successful run at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in the summer of 2018. The retrospective next travels to the Crocker Art Museum (June 23—September 29), and concludes at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 1, 2019—April 10, 2020). 

Suzanne van de Meerendonk (Ph.D. 2018) and Diva Zumaya (Ph.D. 2018) wrote entries for the exhibition catalogue Roep om rechtvaardigheid. Kunst en rechtspraak in de Bourgondische Nederlanden (Hannibal, Veurne, 2018). Suzanne wrote about a painting by Nicolaas van Galen from the Hasselt Town Hall representing the Judgment of William the Good and Diva's entry focused on a painting by Dirck van Delen representing the Tyranny of the Duke of Alva.

Diva Zumaya was also awarded the Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellowship in European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The position is a two-year postdoctoral fellowship that provides intensive curatorial training.