Alumni News

Audrey Sands (2019) has been appointed the Associate Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museum. She will begin on February 3, 2025. Audrey is currently serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Lillian Sellati (2023) has been appointed the Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago in November 2024. Lillian held the Samuel H. Kress Foundation’s Emeline Hill Richardson Rome Prize in Ancient Studies from September 2022-July 2023.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Athens (2015) is an art historian and curator based out of the University of Connecticut. She just relased a new book called William Bartram’s Visual Wonders: The Drawings of an American Naturalists. Per Pittsburgh Press “This book offers the first in-depth investigation of Bartram’s drawing practice as central to his understanding of nature. Through an examination of Bartram’s approach to botanical and zoological representation, Athens highlights the struggle between different modes of seeing nature in eighteenth-century Enlightenment science.”
Evan Freeman (2019), Assistant Professer at Simon Fraser University, and Roland Betancourt (2014), Professor at UC Irvine, have co-edited Byzantine Materiality.  Per Degruyter, “Chapters in this volume consider the cultural meanings and functions of materials such as gold and ivory, the materiality of icons and relics, experiences of objects, as well as Byzantine philosophies of matter and form. Materiality takes center stage in Byzantine constructions of power, luxury, belief, and identity, which will be of interest to scholars and students of Byzantium and the wider medieval world.”
Maurie McInnis (1996) is named Yale’s 24th president.  Maurie will succeed current president Peter Salovey on July 1, 2024.
Rebecca Peabody (2006), Head of Research Projects & Academic Outreach at the Getty Research Institute, has just completed a Coaching for Life and Work program offered through University of California, Davis. Already an active mentor to graduate students and early-career professionals both on and off the tenure track, Rebecca is pleased to now be able to offer coaching as well. She works with a range of clients in individual, group, and organizational settings, focusing in particular on writers, academics (past, present, and future), health-seekers, and change-makers.
Mal Ahern (2019) was the beneficiary of an ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies  (2023-2024).  In addition, she has published an article “Climate Control, Modernism, and Mass Production” in Discourse 45.1-2 (2023).
Mohit Manohar (2022) has been appointed Assistant Professor of South Asian Art in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He will commence in this position beginning in July 2024. Previously, he held the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in South Asian Art at the University of Chicago.
Jennifer Sorkin (2010), will give the keynote lecture at the upcoming symposium, “Braided Histories,” in conjunction with the exhibition, “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” curated by Lynne Cooke, and on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This half-day symposium is scheduled for May 31, 2024, and is being held both in person and hybrid. Registration is free.

Michael Lobel (1999), Professor of Art History at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, has a new book being released in June 2024 called Van Gogh and the End of Nature

Per Yale University Press “Van Gogh and the End of Nature offers a radical revisioning of nealy the full span of the artist’s career, considering Van Gogh’s artistic process, his choice of materials, and some of his most beloved and iconic pictures. Merging a timely sense of environmental urgency with bold new readings of the work of one of the world’s most acclaimed artists, this book weaves together detailed historical research and perceptive analysis into an illuminating portrait of an artist and his changing world.”

Tess Korobkin (Fall 2018) has recieved the 20th annaul Frost Essay Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum for “Monumental Absence: Augusta Savage’s Unbuilt Monuments, 1931-1943, which appears in the fall 2023 issue (vol. 37, no. 3) of American Art. Tess is an Assistant Professor in American Art, in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland.
Katherine Werwie (Spring 2024) has been hired as the new Associate Curator of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Kate is a medieval art scholar who will conceptualize and implement curatorial programming. She started June 1, 2023.

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

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art has named Phillippe Halbert (Spring 2022) as the Richard Koopman Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts. Phillippe has served as interim Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Since November 2022.
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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.

Portrait of Kerr Houston Kerr Houston (2001), Maryland Institute College of Art, has recieved the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing for his article Close Looking: Edward Duffield’s BMA Clock, in Context: History Beyond the Keeping of Time, Bmore Art, May 29, 2023. The Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing is given for a througtfully written and dynamic individual article or essary on some aspect of American craft. A link to Kerr’s article is provided through the Lois Moran Award for Craft Writing announcement. 
Events for August 30, 2023 – YANA
Yale Prison Education Initiative Founding Director S. Zelda Roland (2016) and College-to-Career Fellow Marcus Harvin join Katie Phang of MSNBC to showcase how a transformative journey from jail cells to Yale halls can help break the cycle of incarceration.
 
 For more information: Yale Prison Education Initiative
  

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.

Mohit Manohar (2022) has received the UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize for his dissertation, “The City of Gods and Fortune: An Architectural and Urban History of Daulatabad, ca. 13th–15th centuries.” The prize is awarded to an outstanding dissertation in South Asian art defended at an accredited university in North America and Europe. Dr. Manohar is currently a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in South Asian Art at the University of Chicago. 
See the source image Carolyn M Laferrière (2017) was recently appointed as the new assistant curator of ancient Mediterranean art for Princeton University Art Museum. At Princeton, Carolyn will curate the Museum’s extraordinary collections from around the ancient Mediterranean world, including its holdings of ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern art. 
Cleveland Museum of Art promotes Key Jo Lee as associate curator of American art Key Jo Lee, the associate curator of American art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been appointed chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), the San Francisco museum announced on Friday, October 28, 2022.  She will start in her new position in January 2023.

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.

Grafted Arts Holly Shaffer (2015), Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown, just published Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760-1910 (Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press, 2022). Grated Arts has won the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities. Per Yale University Press,  Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with (of fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualizes the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of “graft” - a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials. 

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.

Mohit Manohar (2022), who will graduate on May 23, 2022, from the Department of the History of Art, has been appointed a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago.  He currently holds an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts and successfully defended his dissertation, The City of Gods and Fortune: An Architectural and Urban History at Daulatabad, ca. 13th–15th centuries, in April 2022.  During his time as Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Manohar plans to complete his book manuscript, provisionally titled Refracted Cities: Delhi and Daulatabad in the Late Medieval Period. He will also be offering two courses on South Asian art.  Mohit Manohar joins the Department of Art History as a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow | Department of Art History (uchicago.edu)
Amy Werbel (1996) Professor of History of Art at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology, has completed her non-resident fellowship at the University of Claifonia National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.  FIT Newsroom provides information about Amy’s research on academic freedom and censorship as well as a link to her report “We all want to talk about this”: A Study of Freedom of Artistic Expression in Academic Art Museums and Galleries.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson (2014), Associate Professor of Black Diaspora Art at Princeton University, published her book Black Bodies, White Gold; Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World in May 2021. Per Duke University Press, “In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes histories of the Black diaspora central to nineteenth-century cultural production.”

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.”

Marni Reva Kessler (1996) Professor, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, has released a new publication Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art. Per the Minnesota University Press, the book is “an intricate and provocative journey through nineteenth-century depictions of food and the often uncomfortable feelings they evoke. “
Mal Ahern (2019) article “Cinema’s Automatisms and Industrial Automation” in diacritics 46:4 received the Annette Kuhn début essay award from Screen in 2020. Mal also recently published an essay called “The Machine that Makes Gossip: Andy Warhol’s Screen Test of Marcel Duchamp” in the Spring 2022 issue of NECSUS

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 20th and 21st century American art and culture. 

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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.

Alexandra K. Morrison (2019) is pleased to announce the publication of her article  “A Forgotten Painter at the Impressionist Exhibitions: ‘Jacques François’ or the Marquise de Rambures (1844–1924),” in September 2021 The Burlington Magazine. The study was over a year in the making.
Christopher Platts (2018) has been newly appointed as Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Art, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Christopher teaches late medieval and early modern art history as well as museum studies at the University of Cincinnati. His research expertise is in the history of European and Mediterranean art, ca. 1300-1600, with a focus on Italian painting, sculpture, and manuscript illumination. He recently curated the in-person exhibition The Great Wonder: Violet Oakley and the Gothic Revival at Vassar at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. The virtual exhibition is available online, along with a 3-D virtual tour.

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.

Wilson Kristina Wilson’s (2001) new book Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design was released in April with Princeton University Press.
Petra Richterova named Schomburg Fellow (scad.edu) Follow at @petrarichterovaphotogrpahy on InstaGram
Neddleman Library of Congress Glenn Adamson (2001) has published Crafts: An American History which was reviewed by the New York Times. An excerpt of his book is provided by the New York Times.
Shih-shan Susan Huang (2005), Associate Professor at Rice University, discusses the role of text and images in Mahayan Buddhism with the Dunhuang Foundation.
Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s (2014), Assistant Professor at Princeton University, lastest book Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World is now available from Duke University Press. In addition, Arabindan-Kesson has started a new project called Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism found here - www.artandcolonialmedicine.com
Maria Taroutina (2013), Associate Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College, Singapore was awarded the 2019 USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies by the Associate for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for her book The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival  In addition, Taroutina received tenure and was elected President of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture in 2020.
Henrike C. Lange (2015) Promoted to Associate Professor at Berkeley-July 6, 2021. Lange also published Giotto’s Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility (Cambridge University Press), as well as, recieved the 2020 Prytanean Faculty Award for distintion in teaching.
‘Prison Initiative founded by Zelda Rowland PhD (2016) April 15, 2021 wins major grant’