Faculty
Graham Bader
Graham Bader, Assistant Professor, PhD. (2005) Harvard University. Dr. Bader is a specialist on 20th century European and American art, with particular interest in the German and Russian interwar avant-gardes and American art after 1945. His published work includes studies of Kazimir Malevich, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and German Neue Sachlichkeit painting, as well as the forthcoming book Hall of Mirrors: Roy Lichtenstein and the Face of Painting in the 1960's. His current research focues on German Dada, in particular the collage and design work of Kurt Schwitters.
Marcia Brennan
Marcia Brennan, Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University, received her PhD from Brown University in 1997. She has taught at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research engages modern and contemporary art history; gender theory; mysticism and comparative religion; and the medical humanities. She is the author of Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2009); Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson (Rice University Press, 2009); Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (MIT Press, 2004); Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2001, 2002); and she is the lead author of the Menil Collection’s twentieth-anniversary exhibition catalogue, A Modern Patronage: De Menil Gifts to American and European Museums (Yale, 2007). In addition to teaching courses in twentieth century American and European art and Religious Studies, she is a Faculty Affiliate in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender.
Leo Costello
Leo Costello, Assistant Professor, PhD. (2003) Bryn Mawr College. Dr. Costello's research is focused on the work of J.M.W. Turner. His current project, J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History, under contract with Ashgate Press, offers the first book-length social history of this major artist. In it, Dr. Costello examines how Turner's subtle and complex historical representations reveal changing notions of individual and collective identity in an age of both developing and fragment British nationhood. His essay on the Slave Ship appeared in the anthology Discourses of Slavery and Abolition and he recently contributed to the catalog of the retrospective exhibition J.M.W. Turner. Dr. Costello is also at work on a study of Giacommetti and portraiture, which is part of an ongoing interest in issues of modernism and inter-subjectivity.
Shirine Hamadeh
Shirine Hamadeh, Assistant Professor, PhD. (1999) MIT. Dr. Hamadeh is the author of The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century. Her research interests include the architectural and urban culture of the early modern and modern Ottoman Empire, concepualizations of public space, and languages of social and spatial in early modern and modern cities.
Shih-shan Susan Huang
Shih-shan Susan Huang, Assistant Professor, PhD. (2002) Yale University. Dr. Huang's current research focuses on the Daoist visual culture in medieval China and the early print culture of East Asia. Her book-length project entitled Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Medieval China is supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo FOundation Junior Scholar Grants. Her recent publications, including studies of Daoist devotional paintings and illustrated printed divinations, appear in Artibus Asiae and Orientations.
Gordon Hughes
Gordon Hughes, Mellon Assistant Professor, PhD. (2004) Princeton University; MFA (1992) University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Hughes is currently completing a book titled Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay, Cubism and Vision in the Face of Modernism on the relationship between Cubism and the pioneering abstract painting of Robert Delaunay. His writing on Delaunay has appeared in The Art Bulletin and October. He has also published on the Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, Jenny Holzer, Hal Foster, and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, which has appeared in Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal and Art History (forthcoming). He was the editor, with Hal Foster, of October Files: Richard Sierra.
Francesca Leoni
Francesca Leoni, PostDoctoral Fellow, PhD (2008) Princeton University. Dr. Leoni's research areas include the art of the book in the Islamic world; cross-cultural exchanges between the Muslim and the European and Far Eastern worlds; figurative art in the Persian-speaking region from antiquity to present; contemporary art from the Middle East; and Islamic aesthetics. She is currently working on two articles, one on the use of lapis lazuli in medieval Islamic art, and a second about the depiction of demons (divs) and their symoblism in the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp. Dr. Leoni recently organized a panel on eroticism and teh sensuous in Islamic art at the 2009 Annual Conference at CAA. She is the visiting specialist and assistant curator of Islamic art at the MFAH. IN addition to making purchases that will expand the newborn collection of Islamic art, she is also working on bringing international exhibitions dedicated to various aspects of this artistic production to Houston.
Joseph Manca
Joseph Manca, Nina J. Cullinan Professor, PhD. (1986) Columbia University. Dr. Manca's research focuses on both Italian Renaissance and Early American art and architecture. His books include The Art of Ercole de' Roberi, Cosme Tura, Moral Essays on the High Renaissance, and Andrea Mantegna and the Italian Renaissance. He also edited and contributed to Titian 500. Forthcoming books include Meaning in Italian Renaissance Art, and George Washington's Eye: Architecture, Landscape, and Art at Mount Vernon.
Linda Elaine Neagley
Linda Elaine Neagley, Associate Professor, PhD. (1983) Indiana University. Dr. Neagley's research interests include late gothic architecture of northern Europe, late medieval urban planning, vision and visuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval pictorial narrative and space. She is the author of Disciplined Exuberance, The Parish Church of Saint-Maclou and Late Gothic architecture in Rouen and is currently working on a book on the open porches of Normandy as well as studies on visual experience and spatial representation in the Bayeux Tapestry. She has published articles in The Art Bulletin, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Gesta.
Lida Oukaderova
Lida Oukaderova, Visiting Assistant Professor, PhD. (2005) University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Oukaderova's research focuses on 20th century European film and literature, particularly Russian. Publications include articles on postwar and contemporary Russian cinema and intersections between culture and economics. Her current book project is on conceptutalizations of space in Soviet cinema of the 1950's-60's.
Caroline Quenemoen
Caroline Quenemoen, Assistant Professor, PhD (2000) Yale University. Dr. Quenemoen specializes in Roman Art and architecture of the late republic and early empire. Her first book, The House of Augustus and the Foundations of Empire, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is currently co-editing a book on Roman architecture with Roger Ulrich from the Blackwell Companion Series.
Diane Wolfthal
Diane Wolfthal, Chairperson of the Department of Art History, David and Caroline Minter Endowed Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Art History, PhD. (1983) Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Dr. Wolfthal is the author of several books, including The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting: 1400-1530, Images of Rape: The "Heroic" Tradition and its Alternatives, and Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy. Forthcoming books include In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art, Trading Values in Early Modern Europe: Money, Morality and Culture (editing with Juliann Vitullo), and the Corpus of Fifteenth Century Painting in teh Southern Netherlands and the Principality of Liege: Early Netherlandish Paintings in Los Angeles (co-authored with Catherine Metzger).