Faculty Showcase, Art History - Wesleyan University

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Nadja Aksamija

Associate Professor of Art HistoryProf. Nadja Aksamija teaches a range of courses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architectural history. Her primary research interests revolve around villa architecture, literature and ideology during the Counter Reformation, but she also works on late Renaissance sacred landscapes more broadly. She has examined them in a series of articles in the context of emblematics, cartography, garden design and landscape painting. Her first book, An Adriatic Renaissance: The Culture and Ideology of the Villa in Sixteenth-Century Dubrovnik, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. A major study of Pope Gregory XIII's Sala Bologna at the Vatican, which she co-edited, was published by Marsilio in 2011. The Sala Bologna research project also resulted in the production, by Factum Arte, of a facsimile of the monumental map of Bologna for the new Museo della Storia di Bologna. Prof. Aksamija's work has been supported by numerous awards, such as the Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Collaborative Grant. In 2012-13, she will be a fellow at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, where she will complete a book on the visual and textual rhetoric of the villa in late sixteenth-century Bologna.

Jonathan Best

Professor of Art HistoryJonathan Best received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976; unusual for its time it was a joint degree from the Department of Fine Arts and the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations. Subsequently he has taught East Asian art history at the University of Virginia and Wesleyan University, but his research and publications—all focused on early Korea—have addressed religious history, diplomatic and political history, as well as art history. His current research centers on the critical historiographic analysis of the Samguk sagi, the oldest surviving history of Korea. Initiating what promises to be a long-term, multi-volume project is his monograph, A History of the Early Korean Kingdom of Paekche—together with an annotated translation of the Paekche Annals of the Samguk sagi (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2006).

Katherine Kuenzli

Associate Professor of Art HistoryKatherine Kuenzli's research focuses on European modernism, 1880-1940. Her topics of research include art and politics; constructions of the Gesamtkunstwerk; interrelationships between painting, architecture, and design; boundaries between public and private spheres; formulations of national versus international cultures; and museums, their history and public. Her publications include a book, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism (2010) and articles and essays in The Art Bulletin (2012), Art, History and the Senses (2010); Art History (2007), and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (2004). She is currently at work on a monograph entitled "From Post-Impressionism to the Bauhaus: Henry van de Velde and the Production of Modernist Culture." Kuenzli teaches courses in modern European art from the French Revolution through World War II, including surveys of nineteenth-century modernism and the twentieth-century avant-garde, and seminars “Vincent Van Gogh and the Myth of Genius” and “Wagner and Modernism.”

Peter Mark

Professor of Art HistoryI am Professor of African Art; I also teach Black American painting. I am trained in both History and Art History. In my research and writing, which focus on West Africa, I seek to combine the methodologies of the two disciplines. A central interest of mine has long been the history of interaction between Africans and Europeans, as reflected in art since the Renaissance. I lived in Senegal 30 years ago and return there regularly. Among my five books are two studies of the Jola peoples of southern Senegal. I have also authored ŒPortuguese¹Style and Luso-African Identity; precolonial Senegambia, sixteenth to nineteenth century. In 2011 I published, with José Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Creation of the Atlantic World. My outside passion is mountains: climbing, skiing, and the history of mountain landscape art.

John Paoletti

Professor of Art History, EmeritusJohn Paoletti taught the history of Italian Renaissance art and of the art of the twentieth century from 1972 to 2009. He was a William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities from 2005 until his retirement. He received the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Wesleyan in 1997 and the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association in 2003. He was a Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton in the spring of 2001 and Visiting Professor at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, in the late fall of 2008. He is currently serving as a member of the Committee on Prints and Illustrated Books, Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 1996-2000 he was the editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, the journal of record in art history in the United States. He served as guest curator for exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as at Wesleyan. In a number of these exhibitions, students served with him as co-curators and co-authors of the catalogue material He is the co-author with Gary Radke of Art in Renaissance Italy, now in its fourth edition. With Roger Crum he is the co-editor of and contributing author to Renaissance Florence: a Social History, (New York, 2006). He has contributed catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the National Gallery of Art and the Nürnberg Kunsthalle. He is currently at work on a monograph on Michelangelo’s David, a study of Medici patronage during the fifteenth century, and a monograph on Georg Baselitz.

Clare Rogan

Curator, Davison Art Center & Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art HistoryAt the Davison Art Center I curate exhibitions ranging from Dutch and Flemish sixteenth-century prints to contemporary photography. My academic specialty is European art from 1848-1945, with an emphasis on German art. I teach courses on the history of photography, the history of prints, and museum studies. My publications include articles on early lithography and on the German lesbian magazines of the 1920s.

Joseph Siry

Professor of Art History & Chair of Art and Art History DepartmentJoseph Siry is professor of modern architectural history. His books are Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store (Chicago, 1988); Unity Temple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Architecture for Liberal Religion (Cambridge, 1996); The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan’s Architecture and the City (Chicago, 2002), which won the 2003 Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for best book by a North American scholar; and Beth Sholom: Frank Lloyd Wright and Modern Religious Architecture (Chicago, 2012). He also published book chapters, and articles in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Art Bulletin, the first of which won College Art Association’s 1991 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for the outstanding article by a younger scholar. He was given Wesleyan’s Binswanger Award for Teaching Excellence in 1994. His work has been funded by the N.E.H., the Getty Research Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the Graham Foundation.

Phillip B. Wagoner

Professor of Art HistoryPhillip B. Wagoner teaches South Asian and Islamic art history and archaeology. His research is broadly concerned with the cultural history of later medieval and early modern India (1200-1600), with specific focuses on architecture and urbanism, the archaeology of buildings, the history of Hindu-Muslim cultural interaction, and traditions of history-writing in Telugu. His books include Tidings of the King: a translation and ethnohistorical analysis of the Rayavacakamu (1993) and (with George Michell) Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre (2001).