In her book project, “Craft Crisis: Handmade Art and Activism since 1970,” Julia Bryan-Wilson examines how artists and activists in the U.S., Chile, and England have used textile hand-making to propose alternative economic and political models of making.
In his book project, “Sensorium and Sacrament in a Hindu Pilgrimage Town: Theological Aesthetics, Ecology, and the Islamicate, 1550–1850,” Sugata Ray takes the aesthetics of seeing nature as locus of inquiry to trace a history of environmental aesthetics in early modern and colonial South Asia.
Grace Harpster’s work follows the pilgrimages of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) in Italy, recreating his interactions with images to construct a theory of Counter-Reformation art based on practice. The actions undertaken in Borromeo’s itineraries reveal a rich landscape of miraculous sculpture and a profound trust in sacred images as purveyors of legal, historical, and sacred truth.
Lisa Trever asks how art and images can be interpreted in an ancient, “non-Western” setting a thousand years removed from textual sources. This problem is situated within a study of mural art made in north coastal Peru in 200–850 CE. Through “archaeo-art history,” Trever uses scientific, material, and visual analyses to write histories that cannot rely on conventional archives.
Sarah Cowan (History of Art) explores the development of a black feminist approach to abstraction through a study of the work of contemporary American artist Howardena Pindell.
Ellen Feiss (History of Art) probes the role played by art and artists in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Albert Lepawsky Fellow
Using India as a case study, Atreyee Gupta (History of Art) is completing a book project on the artistic and intellectual currents of the Non-Aligned Movement, which inaugurated the Third World project at the height of the Cold War.
Imogen Hart (History of Art) is a scholar of modern British art and material culture between 1840 and 1945, with a particular interest in the objects and interiors of the Arts and Crafts movement and the intersections between art and evolutionary theory.
Lisa Pieraccini (History of Art) studies the material and visual culture of ancient Italy (Etruscan and Roman), with a special focus on the portrayal and representation of the ancient world from antiquity to modern times.
Diliana Angelova, a scholar of Greco-Roman visual culture (ancient through medieval), is currently at work on a book about classical art and the “erotic imaginary,” her term for socially sanctioned, historically specific, and artfully expressed ideas about passionate love.
