Faculty Spotlights

Dr. Graham Bader
Graham Bader’s recent projects include Artforum articles on Kurt Schwitters, Gerhard Richter, and the use of absence as a commemorative trope; an essay on twentieth-century photomontage in the 2012 MFAH catalogue Utopia/Dystopia: Construction and Destruction in Photography and Collage; and a contribution on Roy Lichtenstein in the edited volume Contemporary Art/Classical Myth, published by Ashgate in 2011.  For the 2012/13 academic year, he will be a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University in Berlin, continuing his research on Schwitters and early twentieth-century German art.     »

Dr. Leo Costello
Leo Costello's book J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History was published in June 2012 by Ashgate Press. He is currently at work on several projects including essays for the upcoming history paintings exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Turner at the Sea show at the National Maritime Museum in London. He is also researching his next book, Pictures of the Nothing: Romantic Figurations of the Void. »

Dr. Shirine Hamadeh
In 2011-2012 Shirine Hamadeh gave the Rudelson Lecture at Dartmouth College and lectured on 18th-century Ottoman-Mughal artistic contacts at the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) in Ahmedabad, India. She co-organized a panel with Antonios Anastassopoulos for the Comité international des études ottomanes et pré-ottomanes in Rethymno, Crete, for which she gave a talk on the social space of Istanbul’s bachelors in the 18th and early 19th centuries. She also participated in the 14eme congrès des arts turcs in Paris and was a keynote speaker at the David Nichol Smith Conference in Eighteenth-Century Studies in Melbourne. Her upcoming publications include two articles from her current research project on the streets of Istanbul (1720-1840) and a co-authored essay with Stefan Weber on Private Space and Public Sphere in Middle Eastern Cities for the Blackwell Companion of Islamic Art. »

Dr. Gordon Hughes
Gordon Hughes recently participated in two closed-session scholar’s days on Picasso, one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in February 2010 and the other at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in June of that year. In addition, he delivered invited talks on Douglas Huebler at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and on Robert Delaunay at the University of Pennsylvania, and served as respondent at the Menil Collection’s symposium on the art of Henri Rousseau in October. Recent publications include the essays “Camera Lucida, circa 1980” (in Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, published by MIT Press in 2009) and “Exit Ghost” (in Photography after Conceptual Art, published by Wiley-Blackwell last fall).  »

Dr. Fabiola Lopez-Duran
Fabiola López-Durán presented a paper, "Ut-opiates: Nature, Art and Architecture," at L'École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, last September. She recently participated as moderator at international symposium, "Mining the Archive: New Paths for Latin American/ Latino Art Research," the event that followed the launch of a remarkable project:  the ICAA International Center for the Arts of the Americas' digital archive and publications project of twentieth-century Latin American and Latino Art documents. López-Durán is a member of the ICAA Editorial Board. »

Dr. Joseph Manca
Professor Joseph Manca has just published his book George Washington's Eye: Landscape, Architecture, and Design at Mount Vernon (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). He recently published the article "A Theology of Architecture: Edward Savage's Portrait of George Washington and his Family," "Sources: Notes in the History of Art" (Fall 2011). »

Dr. Linda Neagley
Prof. Linda Neagley’s most recent study “Portals of the Bayeux Tapestry: visual experience, spatial representation and oral performance” appeared in 2011 in The Bayeux Tapestry. New Approaches. In May 2012 her class on “The Visual Culture of Medieval Pilgrimage” walked the 120 mile French medieval pilgrimage trail called the Via Podiensis from Le Puy to Moissac, Her current project, “Virtual Rouen” involves the use of new spatial technologies to model the medieval city in order to study the spatial and visual experience of the city at the end of the middle ages. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the International Center of Medieval Art at the Cloisters in New York. »

Dr. Shih-shan Susan Huang
Shih-shan Susan Huang’s book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China, has been published by the Harvard University Asia Center in 2012. Her study of the Daoist body and cosmos appear in the Journal of Daoist Studies in two parts in 2010 and 2011, and her chapter on Hangzhou Buddhist illustrated prints appear in an edited volume on early Chinese prints published by Brill in 2011. Her recent lectures and conference presentations include those given at the University of Chicago, Academi Sinica (Taipei), Chinese University of Hong Kong (HK), and Fudan University (Shanghai). »

Dr. Diane Wolfthal
Diane Wolfthal and Dena Woodall curated an exhibition on the seventeenth-century printmaker Jacques Callot, which will open this Spring at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. They also co-authored the catalogue (to be distributed by Yale University Press), co-organized a symposium in March on the subject, and will team teach a course in conjunction with the show this Spring. Prof. Wolfthal’s Corpus of Fifteenth-Century Painting in the Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liège: Early Netherlandish Paintings in Los Angeles, co-authored with Catherine Metzger of the National Gallery, will be published in 2013 by the Centre d’étude de la peinture du quinzième siècle dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux et la principauté de Liège in Brussels. Wolfthal will present part of her research from this volume at the College Art Association conference this Spring. Recently, she accepted an invitation to speak at a conference to be held at the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Diane Wolfthal will be a Museum Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Institute from April through June.  She accepted an invitation to speak at a conference, The Jewish Book: Histories, Media, Metaphors, to be held at the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies and Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. »