History of Art

Project: "Artistic Materialities in the Early First Millennium Near East: Ivories and Bronzes in North Syria, Phoenicia, and Assyria"
Counterpart: Charles Altieri, English

Project: "Buddha Heads: Buddhist Sculptural Fragments in Devotional and Modern Imaginations"
Counterpart: Michael Nylan, History

Project: "Late 19th Century French Colossal Monuments, Engineering, and Sculpture"
Counterpart: Kathleen James, Architecture

Mont Allen’s dissertation in Art History argues that we have overlooked a central dimension of ancient image making: the communicative power of technique.

A specialist in Roman sculpture, Christopher Hallett is professor of Classics and History of Art.

A graduate of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, and a former student at the British Schools of Archaeology at Athens and Rome, Andrew Stewart is Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology in the Departments of Classics and History of Art.

Elizabeth Gand is writing the first comprehensive study of one of America's greatest living photographers. Gand's dissertation in Art History, Wild Child: Helen Levitt's Photographs and Films, explores Helen Levit's depiction of working class life in her native New York, particularly her images of children at play.

By combining research on maps, religion, and sexuality, Karl Whittington seeks to rescue Opicino de Canistris from his marginalization as the "psychotic artist" of the Italian Middle Ages. Whittington's dissertation in Art History, The Body-Worlds of Opicino de Canistris, Artist and Visionary (1296- ca. 1354), presents the first art-historical study of Opicino's works in over seventy years.

Venus and the female nude in the art of the Renaissance is the subject of Rebekah Compton’s dissertation in Art History, A Cultural Icon: The Currency of Venus in 16th-century Florence. Compton brings together the analysis of specific works with the positive and negative values assigned to the goddess in the poetry, pornography, medicine, astrology, and political propaganda of the times.