Constellations
Beginning this year the department is undertaking a major initiative to reorganize faculty and graduate research along more collaborative and interdisciplinary lines. We have formed research constellations around six major ideas and related tags.
By design, these groups overlap with one another and intersect with disciplines outside art and architectural history. Faculty and graduate students may belong to more than one at a time and may shift as their projects evolve. The ideas and their tags also are not fixed. We expect them to change organically over time, perhaps merging, perhaps splitting, to meet the changing needs of the scholars within them and the field without.
We recognize that traditionally defined areas of expertise remain foundational for rigorous historical inquiry, which has long been a strength of our department. Our constellations are not meant to replace specializations but to connect them in more explicit and imaginative ways. Through connectivity comes innovation and new knowledge. Over the next year we will work these constellations into our departmental programming and our PhD admissions and curriculum.
| VISUAL KNOWLEDGE |
image/text relations, representational theory, historiography, museums, media Faculty: Drew Armstrong, Isabelle Chartier, Josh Ellenbogen, Karen Gerhart, Alison Langmead, Kathy Linduff, Kirk Savage, Terry Smith, Frank Toker |
| AGENCY |
ritual, cult objects, idolatry and iconoclasm, patronage, collecting, propaganda Faculty: Gretchen Bender, Isabelle Chartier, Josh Ellenbogen, Karen Gerhart, Jennifer Josten, Kathy Linduff, Barbara McCloskey, Kirk Savage |
| IDENTITY |
monuments and memory, communities and polities, publics, gender, ethnicity, class, race Faculty: Drew Armstrong, Gretchen Bender, Karen Gerhart, Jennifer Josten, Kathy Linduff, Kirk Savage, Terry Smith |
| MOBILITY/ EXCHANGE |
migration, pilgrimage, exploration, tourism, frontiers, contact zones, trade and consumerism Faculty: Drew Armstrong, Gretchen Bender, Isabelle Chartier, Karen Gerhart, Jennifer Josten, Alison Langmead, Kathy Linduff, Barbara McCloskey, Kirk Savage, Terry Smith |
| CONTEMPORANEITY |
world picturing, cosmopolitanism, temporality, tradition and modernity Faculty: Isabelle Chartier, Josh Ellenbogen, Alison Langmead, Barbara McCloskey, Kirk Savage, Gao Minglu, Terry Smith |
| ENVIRONMENT |
landscape, urbanism, gardens, ecocriticism, historic preservation, architectural history and theory Faculty: Drew Armstrong, Gretchen Bender, Karen Gerhart, Kathy Linduff, Mina Rajagopalan, Kirk Savage, Terry Smith, Frank Toker |
