Message from the Chair
Our departmental efforts are wonderful models of the power of academic collaboration, and, as usual, they go hand in hand with outstanding individual achievement at all levels.
This year the centerpiece activity for the department was the promotion and tenuring of two Assistant Professors, Drew Armstrong and Josh Ellenbogen. These cases marked the publication of a string of articles by each and three books: Drew’s monograph, Julien-David Leroy and the Making of Architectural History – which was published in October 2011 by Routledge; and Josh’s monograph, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images, Penn State Press, 2012, as well as his co-edited anthology, Idol Anxiety, 2011. All these are major accomplishments and high level contributions to the field—in the areas of the creation of knowledge and the history of photography and imagination.
Two new hires has given us the opportunity to rethink the shape of the HAA group and we recruited two spectacular new Assistant Professors in March 2012. Jennifer Josten (PhD 2012 Yale) works in the modern/contemporary period in Latin America, a new area for us and one we have hoped to include for many years. Her dissertation examines a German artist whose career was spent mostly in Mexico. She has also worked in Cuba and Bolivia, and is especially well suited to intersect with CLAS as well as to work on ‘Art of the Americas’ and to anchor the contemporary art program beyond Europe. Shirin Fozi (PhD 2010 Harvard) is a student of 11th and 12th century mortuary sculpture and ritual in Germany and France, and has a wide range of interests within the medieval period, some stretching as far as the Near East. Both will arrive on campus in the fall 2013.
Congratulations are due to our other faculty who have kept up a remarkable rate of productivity and honors. Beyond the two first books from our assistant professors Drew Armstrong and Josh Ellenbogen, other accomplishments include the publication of Terry Smith’s Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Saddleback River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011) and What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) published in Spanish and Korean. The final publication of Settlement Patterns in the Chifeng Region: Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project, (collaborative with the Chifeng team) Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh, 2011) represents the final report on ten year field project in northeast China directed by Katheryn Linduff and Dick Drennan.
And, congratulations are also due to our amazing students. This fall our graduate students held a national graduate symposium in conjunction with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Exhibition Complex: displaying People, Identity, Culture, October 18-20, starting off with the keynote speaker, Prof. Saloni Mathur, from UCLA. They also launched the second issue of their online journal Contemporaneity, which features contributions from scholars at all levels. They are now selecting articles for the third issue. Our undergraduates showcased their own research and experiential learning in a spectacular event, HAAARCH, in the University Art Gallery that drew a large audience from across the campus and community and have gone on to graduate and professional programs across the country, have held internships at local galleries and museums, and have been selected to speak at national meetings. Still others have found jobs in the art world from gallery positions to architectural firms.
Barbara McCloskey, Chair of HAA
