Faculty News | Graduate Students-News | Undergraduate Students-News | Staff News | Archive

Faculty News, 2008-09

Sarah McPhee is on leave this year on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship during which time she is completing her book manuscript: "Bernini's Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini."

Prof. McPhee was the keynote speaker at the J. Paul Getty Museum on October 5, 2008 in conjunction with their exhibition "Bernini and the Birth of the Baroque Portrait Bust,." and published a review of the exhibition in the Burlington Magazine in March 2009.

Walter Melion has been spending the 2008-9 academic year at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar (midway between Haarlem and Leiden). Since September, he has given about a dozen lectures at venues in Europe and the U.S., with lectures to follow at Geneva, Leuven, Paris, and Wassenaar.  With Karl Enenkel, he has organized an international conference on the topic 'Discourses of Meditation,' to take place at NIAS April 23-25.  Co-curated with Jim Clifton, the exhibition 'Scripture for the Eyes,' opens at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York in June; the exhibition catalogue features

Prof. Melion's monographic essay, 'Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands.'

James Meyer has presented the following talks:

• Lecture, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, October 2008.
• Keynote Lecture, Graduate Student Art History Symposium on "Ephemerality," the University of Michigan, October 2008.
• Keynote Lecture, "Dwelling, Walking, Falling: Conference on the Experience of Everyday Space," University of Manchester, February 2009.
• Respondent, "Los Angeles Light and Space: Reconsidering the Perceptual
  Rush," College Art Association, Los Angeles, February 2009.
• Visiting speaker, "Spheres of Interest" series, San Francisco Art Institute, April 2009.
• Lecture, "Sculpture at the Edges of Modernity," Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, April 2009.

Prof. Meyer's essay, "The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Art History," has been published in Okwui Enwezor et. al., Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antimonies of Art and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 324-332.

Elizabeth Pastan received a Crystal Apple Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Seminar Education in February 2009.

Prof. Pastan has published the following recently:

• Co-editor, The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Art in honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness, with Evelyn Staudinger Lane and Ellen Shortell (Oxford: Ashgate Publishers, 2009), includes co-authored scholarly introduction, pp. 1-10, and thirty scholarly articles, arranged thematically.
• “Realpolitik and Artistic Patronage in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Troyes,” in The Four Modes of Seeing: Approaches to Medieval Art in honor of Madeline Harrison Caviness (Oxford: Ashgate Publishers, 2009), pp. 530-47.
• “Montfaucon as Reader of the Bayeux Tapestry,” in Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages, ed. Janet T. Marquardt and Alyce A. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 89-110.
• “Saint Charlemagne? Relics and the choice of window subjects at Chartres Cathedral,” in The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade, ed. Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey, The New Middle Ages Series (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), pp. 97-135.

Rebecca Stone gave the following talks:

• “Whale Sharks and Female Shamans: the Case for a Chancay Figurine Depicting Transformation into a Whale Shark,” with Dr. Bruce Carlson, Chief Science Officer of the Georgia Aquarium, Michael C. Carlos Museum, April 2, 2009.
• “The Trance Eye in Ancient Andean Art,” in Session “About Face: Portrait, Mask, and Facial Expression in Mesoamerica and the Andes, 6000 BC–AD 1600,” College Art Association Annual Meetings, Los Angeles, California, February 27, 2009.
• “The On-going Tradition of Living Rocks and Shamanic Healing in Amazonian Ecuador: The Case of Augustín Grefa,” First Southeast Conference on Amazonian and Andean Studies, Florida International University, Boca Raton, Florida, September 20, 2008.

Eric Varner had these articles appear:

•       “Transcending Gender: Assimilation, Identity and Roman Imperial Portraits,” in S. Bell and I Hansen, eds. Role Models: Identity and Assimilation in the Roman World (Supplement to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 7, Ann Arbor, 2008) 185-205.
•       “Memory Sanctions, Identity Politics and Altered Imperial Portraits,” in S. Benoist and A. Daguet-Gagey, eds., Un Discours en Images de la Condemnation de Mémoire (Centre Régional Universitaire Lorrain d’Histoire Site de Metz 34, Metz 2008) 129-52.
•       “Reconfiguring Roman Portraits: Theories and Practices,” The Good the Bad and the Altered: Reworked Roman Portraits and the Jocelyn Augustus, Creighton University, April 2009.
•       “Violent Discourses: Visual Cannibalism and the Portraits of Rome’s ‘Bad’ Emperors,” The Archaeology of Violence: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Violence and and Conflict, Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology, State University of New York, Buffalo, April 2009.