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Brett-Smith, Sarah

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Professor Brett-Smith’s most recent book is The Silence of the Women: Bamana Mud Cloths (Five Continents Press, 2014). This fully illustrated volume documents an in-depth field investigation of female dyeing that balances her previous work on the production of ritual sculpture by Bamana men. The Silence of the Women discusses the technique of painting cloth with mud, the symbolism of the designs on the cloth, and the important role of ritually charged mud cloth at critical moments -- excision, marriage, childbirth and death -- in women's lives. Read from beginning to end it describes the entirety of women’s lives among the Bamana – difficult, harsh in many respects, but also characterized by great affection for other women and respect for those who have achieved a deep level of knowledge.
Professor Brett-Smith’s publications also include: The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender, Cambridge University Press, 1994 -- winner of the Arnold J. Rubin Award for the most outstanding book on African Art, 1993, awarded by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and winner of Honorable Mention for the 1995 Victor Turner Prize, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, The Artfulness of M'Fa Jigi: An Interview with Nyamaton Diarra (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), and "The Mouth of the Komo," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 31 (1997): 71. Dr. Brett-Smith is currently working on an article dealing with concepts of personhood and the “Demoiselles D’Avignon.” Early articles and the introduction to Dr. Brett-Smith's 1994 book, The Making of Bamana Sculpture, can be downloaded from Dr. Brett-Smith’s page on Academia.edu.
Flores, Tatiana

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Professor Flores is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Art History and an affiliate of the Critical Caribbean Studies Program. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American art, she is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013). A revisionist and interdisciplinary account of Mexican modern art as seen through two avant-garde movements, the book received the 2014 Humanities Book Prize awarded by the Mexico Section of Latin American Studies Association. It was also runner-up for the Photography/Art category at the Southern California Book Festival and the Los Angeles Book Festival in 2013. Her second book project in progress focuses on the art and visual culture of Venezuela during the presidency of Hugo Chávez.
Kenfield, John

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John Kenfield specializes in ancient Greek Art, and to a lesser extent Roman Art and Byzantine Art as indicated by his articles ranging in date from Late Geometric period through the Archaic period, the Late Classical period, and the Hellenistic period, as well as Imperial Rome and the Early Byzantine Empire. The bulk of Kenfield’s scholarship has concentrated on the architectural sculpture in terracotta produced in the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily, most recently in Deliciae Fictiles III: Architectural Terracottas in Ancient Italy: New Discoveries and Interpretations, with I. Edlund-Berry and Giovanna Greco (Oxford 2006). His monograph publication of the architectural terracottas of Sicilian Morgantina will appear as Morgantina Studies V: the Archaic City, with Carla Antonaccio and Barbara Barletta. Ancient mosaics are another of Kenfield’s abiding scholarly interests as appears in “Mosaics” and “Wall-Paintings” in E.R. Hostetter and T.N. Howe (eds.) The Romano-British Villa at Castle Copse, Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire (Bloomington 1997). Kenfield is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1976-1977) and a member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1965(). He received his doctorate at Princeton University (1972) and his BA in Classics at Brown University.
McHam, Sarah Blake

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Sarah Blake McHam is a distinguished professor at Rutgers. Most of her research has focused on Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sculpture in Florence, Venice, and in the Veneto in books like The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture and Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, and in numerous articles.

Her most recent book, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History, won the Roland Bainton prize of the Sixteenth Century Studies Society for the best art history book of 2013. Her recent article in the Renaissance Quarterly of fall 2016 involves a new interpretation of Donatello’s High Altar in the Santo, which will be part of her new book about Paduan art in the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries, her current book project.
Paul, Benjamin

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Benjamin Paul teaches Italian Renaissance art at Rutgers, with a focus on Venice. His book Nuns and Reform Art in Early Modern Venice. The architecture of Santi Cosma e Damiano and its Decoration from Tintoretto to Tiepolo appeared in 2012. In addition, he has published an edited volume on the crisis in late sixteenth-century Venice (Celebrazione e autocritica. La Serenissima e la ricerca dell’identità veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento, 2014) and another on the tombs of the doges (The Tombs of the Doges of Venice from the Beginning of the Serenissima to 1907, 2016). Currently he is writing a monograph on Jacopo Tintoretto and another book entitled The Agency of Art in the Crisis of late Cinquecento Venice. Paul also works as a curator and critic. In 2001, he has organized an exhibition of Wolfgang Tillmans’ still life photographs and he is a regular contributor to Artforum.
Puglisi, Catherine

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Catherine Puglisi specializes in Early Modern Italian art. Her books include Caravaggio (Phaidon Press, 1998), and Francesco Albani, a monograph and catalogue raisonné of the seventeenth-century Bolognese painter (Yale University Press, 1999). Other publications include studies on Bolognese art, Venetian 18th century art, and most recently on the Man of Sorrows in Venetian art, the subject of a forthcoming collaborative book, Art and Faith in the Venetian World: Venerating Christ as Man of Sorrows (Brepols, 2018). This theme was the focus of the 2011 exhibition, she co-curated, “Passion in Venice: The Man of Sorrows from Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese,” at the Museum of Biblical Art (MoBia), whose catalogue she co-edited and co-authored, with entries by Rutgers graduate students. Selected papers from the symposium tied to the exhibition appeared in her co-edited volume, New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows (2013). Her current project addresses artistic transformations in the Baroque.
Rico, Trinidad

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Trinidad Rico is Assistant Professor and Director of Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies (CHAPS), and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology of University College London. Dr Rico’s anthropological research in critical heritage is defined by the study of vernacularization of heritage discourses and forms of expertise in non-Western societies. She has conducted research on heritage construction in post-tsunami Indonesia; the mobilization of Islamic values in heritage preservation in Qatar; and currently runs a pilot study on heritage of secrecy in Argentina. Dr Rico is editor for the book series Heritage Studies in the Muslim World, and member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.
Sears, Tamara

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Tamara Sears is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the art and architectural history of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent. Her first book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2014), received the PROSE award in Architecture and Urban Planning. She is currently working on a second book that examines the relationships among architecture, environmental history, and travel on local, regional, and global scales. Her essays have appeared in well over a dozen volumes and journals, including The Art Bulletin, Ars Orientalis, and Archives of Asian Art. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Clark Art Institute. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1996 and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004.
Sharp, Jane Ashton

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Dr. Sharp is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History, at Rutgers where she also acts as Research Curator of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, at the Zimmerli Art Museum. She teaches 20th and 21st century European art (including Central and Eastern European), as well as Soviet unofficial art. Her research focuses on the historical Russian avant-garde and Soviet era unofficial art. Her book, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde, 1905-14 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) won the 2007 Robert Motherwell Prize from the Dedalus Art Foundation.

Since arriving at Rutgers in 1999, she has curated over 12 exhibitions at the Zimmerli, accompanied by a variety of publications on Soviet unofficial art. She recently published Thinking Pictures: The Visual Field of Moscow Conceptualism, the catalogue for her exhibition dawn from the Dodge Collection held at the Zimmerli Art Museum (September 6-December 31, 2016). She is currently completing a book manuscript on abstract painting in Moscow during the Thaw.
Sidlauskas, Susan

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Susan Sidlauskas teaches the history and theory of modern art, and while she offers both undergraduate and graduate field courses, most of her teaching tends to be thematic (“Art and Medicine” for undergraduates; “Race and Representation” seminars for both undergraduates and graduate students.) She is currently co-directing (with Professor Ann Jurecic of the Rutgers English Department) a seminar at Rutgers’ Center for Cultural Analysis on the Medical Humanities. She is the author of a study of interiority: Body, Place and Self in 19th Century Art (2000), and Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, winner of the Dedalus book prize in 2010. She is currently at work on two book projects: John Singer Sargent and the Physics of Touch and The Medical Portrait in Photography and Film. She hopes to finish essays on Manet’s portraits and Cézanne’s “domestic uncanny” in the near future. She was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.
Thunø, Erik

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Erik Thunø is Professor of Medieval Art. His research focuses on early medieval European art, particularly reliquaries, icons, and monumental imagery in Rome, but he has also worked on thirteenth-century Rome, European altar frontals, and miracle-working images of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A second area of focus is medieval art of the South Caucasus region (Armenia and Georgia) with particular emphasis on cross-cultural features and historiography. By linking his objects of research with their viewers, materials, inscribed texts, and the rituals surrounding them, Professor Thunø is primarily concerned with the dynamics by which medieval visual culture made the visible world intersect with its invisible counterpart.
Weigert, Laura

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Laura Weigert, Professor of Art History, specializes in Northern European art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. She has taught at the University of Nantes and Reed College and in 2015 was an invited Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her research has been supported by grants from the NEH, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society; she has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, a Samuel Kress Fellow at CASVA, and an invited researcher at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art. Her most recent book, French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. She has served as President of the Consortium for Teaching the Middle Ages (TEAMS) and is currently Chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and Director of Medieval Studies at Rutgers.
Wiley, Amber

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Amber specializes in architecture, urbanism, and African American cultural studies. Her research interests are centered on the social aspects of design and how it affects urban communities - architecture as a literal and figural structure of power. She focuses on the ways local and national bodies have made the claim for the dominating narrative and collective memory of cities and examines how preservation and public history contribute to the creation and maintenance of the identity and “sense of place” of a city.
Yanni, Carla

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Carla Yanni is the author of three monographs, each one a social history of a single building type. Residence Life: A Social and Architectural History of College Dormitories in the United States (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming, 2018) examines the dwellings of college students. The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (University of Minnesota Press, now in its third printing) offers an exploration of Kirkbride plan mental hospitals. The Architecture of Madness won a Graham Foundation grant and was named “Book of Critical Interest” byCritical Inquiry in 2007. During the academic year 2002-2003 she was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. In 2000, Johns Hopkins University Press published her first book, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display. She received the Society of Architectural Historians Founders’ Award for the best article in the JSAH in 1996. She earned the doctorate in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.
Zervigón, Andrés Mario

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Andrés Mario Zervigón is Associate Professor of the History of Photography. His scholarship concentrates on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art, generally focusing upon moments in history when these media prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual. Zervigón is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Photography and Germany, for the Reaktion Books Exposures series (2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (Routledge 2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Zimmerli Musuem/Hirmer Verlag, 2017). His current book project is Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung -- The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at Rutgers that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory and practice.