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Study Abroad Program in Rome
During the spring of 2006, the Art History Department made two new, exciting hires: Laura Weigert, a Northwestern University Ph.D. and Northern Renaissance specialist who is coming to us after teaching several years at Reed College in Oregon, and Benjamin Paul, a recent Ph.D. from Harvard, who will enhance our already significant concentration in Italian Renaissance and Baroque studies. Laura, who was offered tenure by Rutgers on the strength of her scholarship and teaching, is a specialist in French tapestry, and is involved in the upcoming exhibition of tapestry masterpieces opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This year, she is officially on leave, supported by a fellowship from the American Philosophical Society. She will begin her teaching here at Rutgers in the fall of 2007. Benjamin Paul, who will join the faculty in the fall of 2007, is a specialist in Venetian Renaissance painting, and also has a strong interest in contemporary art, particularly in photography. This spring, he is a fellow in Rome at the German Historical Institute. We look forward to a very lively assembly at our department's "annex" at 60 College Avenue. We are pleased (and relieved--during this current budget crisis) to be searching for a specialist in the "Art of the Americas" this year, an acknowledgement that the boundaries of American art have expanded and become more fluid. The search committee, chaired by Professor Joan Marter, will be interviewing at this year's annual College Art Meeting in New York. It’s time to resume the tradition of American art at Rutgers, which was exemplified by Professor Emeritus Matthew Baigell. The debut of our summer program in Rome, directed by Tod Marder and Erik Thuno,
was a resounding success, and will continue this year. See their comments on
the program in this newsletter, as well as the accompanying photographs and
quotes from students who spent an enjoyable and stimulating six weeks in Rome.
Our summer program in Paris, directed for many years by Seth Gopin, enjoyed
its largest enrollment ever, and gave students insights into the inner workings
of the Louvre, as well as to the complexities of the urban history of Paris.
We want to express our gratitude to Seth, who will be teaching his last summer
there this year, having recently retired from Rutgers. I was invited by Greg Trevor of media relations here to attend a lunch hosted by President Richard McCormick and Executive Vice-President Philip Furmanski for the editors and education reporters of the Star Ledger. The Star Ledger staff wanted to speak to faculty from a diverse array of departments, to better understand the nature of the work we do--a researchers, advisors and teachers. They were particularly interested in how our department's Visual Resources Collection, under the direction of Donald Beetham, manages to serve the digital needs of not only our own nearly two hundred art history majors, graduate students and faculty, but the entire Rutgers community, which participates in the Luna Insight program for digital imagery. Jane Sharp, our specialist in Russian and 20th century European art, is spending the spring semester teaching at the University of Utrecht in Holland, the first of our faculty to take advantage of an exchange program--for both faculty and graduate students--between Rutgers and Utrecht, which has been negotiated for three departments of the university: Art History, Linguistics, and Women's Studies. In another fruitful exchange, this spring we are hosting a young art historian from Azerbaijan, Rayiha Mammadli, a Ph.D. student from the Azerbaijan State Academy of Science, who is auditing a number of our courses, which she hopes will help her shape an art history curriculum for the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts. Our faculty's scholarship continues to be recognized both nationally and internationally. Penny Small received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her work on "Optics and Illusionism in Classical Art." Archer St. Clair Harvey is spending part of this year in Rome, having been awarded a multiple year Samuel H. Kress Foundation European Preservation Grant. Catherine Puglisi was the recipient of a J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Erik Thunø has received a Humboldt Fellowship for the academic year 2007-2008, which he will spend in both Rome and Germany. Meredith and Michael Bzdak continue to support our undergraduate majors with a summer travel fellowship to Milan, and support from the Quigley family sustains a program of support for both our graduate students and undergraduates. Over the past year, we have welcomed guest lecturers Jeffrey Hamburger from Harvard, "Representations of Reading -- Reading Representations: The Female Reader from the Hedwig Codex to Châtillon’s Léopoldine au Livre d’Heures" Anna Chave, from Queens College, who spoke on “Figuring the Origins of the Modern at the Fin de Siècle: The Trope of the Pathetic Male,” Nan Rosenthal, Senior Consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines Show at the Met,” Paulo Varela Gomes, “Centrally and not so centrally planned churches in Portuguese architecture, 16th and 17th centuries” as well as a lecture that was co-sponsored by the Computer Science department, David Stork, Ricoh Innovations, Computer Scientist, “Did the Great Masters cheat using optics?” In an informal colloquium, Gerhard Wolf, Director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, shared his experiences and research, and had valuable suggestions for our students in Italian Studies. Our Ph.D. student Katie Poole spent last year in Florence at the "Kunst", as the Institute is affectionately known. Collaborations with the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum included our participation in a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Breaking the Mold: Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, curated by Dennis Cate, who recently retired as the Zimmerli's Director; and a symposium dedicated to the Hungarian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, in honor of the exhibition on artist Moholy-Nagy. Next year, our Ph.D. student Florence Quideau will curate an exhibition at the Zimmerli on the prints and caricatural sculptures of Daumier, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth. We are looking forward to another year of vital activity within Rutgers, excited by the recent hirings of dynamic faculty, and looking toward the new hiring in the Art of the Americas. Our graduate students are giving papers at symposia across the country, and our undergraduates are producing a roster of intriguing senior theses (with the help of graduate students Lisa West and Patrick Coleman). Budget crises notwithstanding, the department continues to flourish. Archer St. Clair Harvey will return as the chair of the department on July
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