Alumni News

Henrike Christiane Lange (2015), Associate Professor of History of Art and Italian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, just released a new book — Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts — a collaboration with theoretical physicist Tom McLeish FRS, Professor Emeritus of Natural Philosophy at the University of York (UK).

The publication of Eclipse & Revelation is the culmination of a seven-year, grant-supported interdisciplinary science-humanities project that spanned the time between the Great American Eclipse of 2017 and that of 2024. The book release is accompanied by exhibitions in the UK (Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society) and on the UC Berkeley campus. Lange opened the UK book launch event and exhibition for Eclipse & Revelation at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House in London in February 2024. In March, Lange will host a US book launch event on the Berkeley campus with her colleague from UC Berkeley Astronomy, Alex Filippenko, and the NASA-Partner Eclipse Megamovie 2024 Project. Lange and Filippenko will also be in conversation about their respective co-authors, Tom McLeish and Jay Pasachoff. For the Great American Eclipse of April 8, 2024, Lange will be on a book tour through the Southwest (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona). Lange’s Berkeley eclipse online exhibit is available at https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/mapsandmore/eclipse2024. 

Jenny Tang (Spring 2024) is the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow (2023-2025) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her teaching and scholarship interrogate how changing regimes of state and polity have shaped the artist, the work of art, and the history of art as a discipline, with an emphasis on comparative analyses of race and gender. She is currently at work on “Body Without Form: The Specter of the US Citizen in Modern Art,” a book on modernist aesthetics of the body in painting, sculpture, and visual culture as seen through the material history of American citizenship. Her research in development further examines the relationship between artistic production and the social reproduction of mobility for some bodies, along with incarceration and confinement for others.

R. Ruthie Dibble, PhD. (2020) is the new Robert N. Shapiro Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum PEM) . MS&R Senior Search Consultant Connie Rosemont led the national search.

Most recently serving as Curator at The Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dibble specializes in American and British decorative arts from the eighteenth century to the present. Her curatorial work expands the field of American decorative arts by examining the global circulation of objects, the relationship between craft and identity, and the role of craftspeople as agents of social change. Emphasizing collaboration and community connection, Dibble’s curatorial projects empower diverse perspectives and audiences. 

Dibble received a Ph.D. and M. Phil in the History of Art from Yale University, an M.A. in Art History from Williams College, and a B.A. in Art History from Hamilton College. At PEM, Dr. Dibble will oversee one of the country’s preeminent American decorative arts collections, featuring exceptional holdings of furniture, furnishings, and works of material culture. She will also develop an American decorative art gallery and exhibition roster, as well as help develop new interpretative strategies for PEM’s historic houses.

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (2018 HoA/Film), Lecturer in Film and Media at UCL, has published her book (based on her dissertation): The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity with the Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press. From Victorian breakthroughs in synthesising pigments to the BBC’s conversion to chromatic broadcasting, the book shows how the story of colour’s technological development is inseparable from wider processes of modernisation that transformed Britain. This revolutionary history brings to light how new colour technologies informed ideas about national identity during a period of profound social change, when the challenges of industrialisation, decolonisation of the Empire and evolving attitudes to race and gender reshaped the nation. Offering a compelling new account of modern British visual culture that reveals colour to be central to its aesthetic trajectories and political formations, this chromatic lens deepens our understanding of how British art is made and what it means, offering a new way to assess the visual landscape of the period and interpret its colourful objects. Across a kaleidoscopic array of materials, from radiant paintings by major Victorian artists, vivid print advertisements and vibrant interwar fashion photographs, to glorious Technicolor films and the prismatic programmes of the BBC’s early years of colour television, The Rainbow’s Gravity reveals how Britain modernised colour and how colour, in turn, modernised Britain.

Sophie Lynford (2019), the Theodore Rousseau Curatorial Fellow in European Art at the Harvard Art Museums.  just released Painting Dissent: Art, Ethics, adn the American Pre-Raphaelites through Princeton University Press, 2022. Per Princeton University Press, the American Pre-Raphaelites founded a uniquely interdisciplinary movement composed of politically radical abolitionist artists and like-minded architects, critics, and scientists. Active during the Civil War, this dynamic collective united in a spirit of protest, seeking sweeping reforms of national art and culture. Painting Dissent recovers the American Pre-Raphaelites from the margins of history and situates them at the center of transatlantic debates about art, slavery, education, and politics.

Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of archival material, Painting Dissent transforms our understanding of how American artists depicted the nation during the most turbulent decades of the nineteenth century.

Sylvia Houghtelling (2015), Assistant Professor of Art History at Bryn Mawr, published her first book called The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022).  Per Princeton University Press, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India tells the story of textiles crafted and collected across South Asia and beyond, illuminating how cloth particpated in political negotiations, social conversations, and the shared seasonal rhythms of the year. The book is beautifully illustrated and offers an incomparable account of the aesthetics and techniquest of cloth and cloth making and the ways that textiles shaped the social, polictal, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia.

Susanna Newbury (2014), Associate Professor of art history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her lastest book  The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles was published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. It was a finalist for CAA’s 2022 Charles Rufus Morey award.  The book is said to be “a forensic examination of the mutual relationship between art and real estate in a transforming Los Angeles.”

Daniel Spaulding (2017), Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Art History Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the joint-prize winner of this year’s (2022) Joseph Beuys Prize for Research for his dissertation Beuys, Terror, Value: 1967-1979. The Prize is awarded by The Museum Schloss Moyland Foundation. It recognizes internationally outstanding achievements by young scholars in interdisciplinary research on the artist Joseph Beuys.

Rebecca Peabody (2006) recently published the edited volume Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (X Artists’ Books, 2022) with her co-editors Kristin Juarez and Glenn Phillips. The book focuses on the pioneering work of African American choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings, and serves as a companion volume to an exhibition by the same title. Both the book and exhibition were the first produced by the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative. Rebecca – head of research projects and academic outreach at the GRI – focuses on representations of identity in 20^th and 21^st century American art and culture. 

Andrea Wolk Rager (2009) has recently been promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.

Andrea also released her book The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones through the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in May 2022, which will be distributed by Yale University Press in June 2022.

Alison Locke Perchuk (2009) is celebrating the release of The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone, (Studies in the visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, No. 17, Turnhout: Brepols: 2021). Blending innovative art historical analysis with archaeology, epigraphy, history, liturgy, theology, and landscape and memory studies, it is the first comprehensive interdisciplinary study of a deeply intelligent yet understudied male Benedictine convent near Rome. The only monastery known to have been dedicated to the prophet Elijah in the Latin West, it was rebuilt c.1122–26 with papal patronage. The book had its origins in a 2010 Yale dissertation, completed under Robert S. Nelson with Jacquelyn Jung as the second departmental reader.

Alison has been awarded the resident National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Huntington Library for the 2022-2023 year.