Faculty
Gretchen Holtzapple Bender
Assistant Chair and director of undergraduate program; lecturer, modern European art and architectural history
Constellation(s): Agency, Environment, Identity, Mobility/Exchange
As assistant chair and director of undergraduate studies for the department, Gretchen Holtzapple Bender devotes her attention to teaching, curriculum development and pedagogy, and oversees the educational and pre-professional advising of over 220 undergraduate majors in HAA and architectural studies. She has enjoyed teaching at the University of Pittsburgh since 2002, offering a wide range of courses including the introductory History of World Art that she designed, several courses in modern art and architecture, and research and writing seminars on feminism and art history, Romantic landscape, Berlin Architecture, and ‘The Studio’. She has played a central role in the revision of the core curriculum in the undergraduate HAA program and established a developmental advising process for the department. Completing her dissertation at Bryn Mawr College under the guidance of Christiane Hertel, Holtzapple Bender’s research focuses on the landscape practice of Caspar David Friedrich in the context of a broader and emerging European visual culture. Specifically, she is interested in the gendering of place and embodied spectatorship in early 19th-century European culture.
Education
PhD, Bryn Mawr
Selected Publications
“Gaertner’s Compromise: Spectatorship and Social Order in the 1834 Panorama of Berlin,” journal article under review.
“Interior/Landscape: Placelessness and the Gendered Gaze in the Work of Caspar David Friedrich,” dissertation, Bryn Mawr College (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2001).
Selected Awards
Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2008.
Doris Sill Carland Prize for Excellence in Teaching, Bryn Mawr College, 1996
Phi Beta Kappa
Current projects:
Holtzapple Bender’s research project, Tracing Caroline: Women and Wandering in the Landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, investigates a core group of paintings by the artist, all of which feature prominently men and women as observers: Woman at a Window, Woman Before a Setting Sun, Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, and Chalk Cliffs at Rügen. She explores the role gender plays in the construction and reception of these landscape spaces and the relationship of women as spectators to the male Romantic wanderer. She also explorse the way in which Friedrich’s interest in nature as spectacle parallels the desire to intensify the visual experience in panoramas, dioramas, transparent pictures and other popular entertainments in the broader visual culture of this era, and how his interest in the experience of traveling intersects with the rise of tourism as a social practice. In addition to her research interests, Holtzapple Bender engages in collage and art book production, completing Proverbs in 2011 and The American Gun: The Intervention of Ceres in 2012.
