Spotlight on Alumna Anne Heath, Mellon Program Director
When Dr. Anne Heath received her MA in Art History from FSU in 1998, it was the beginning of a rich and rewarding career as a gallery director, medievalist, architectural historian, faculty mentor, and leader in digital media scholarship. This year she was appointed director of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholars Program in the Arts and Humanities at Hope College in Holland, MI, where she is Associate Professor of Art and Art History. Heath has been a member of the Hope College faculty since 2007 and has been involved with the College’s Mellon Scholars Program since its inception. Students in the program conduct research under faculty mentors in a variety of academic disciplines, with a particular emphasis on new and emerging digital technologies. Dr. Heath brings a background of academic leadership and digital media experience to her new position as director of the prestigious program.
After receiving her B.A. with honors in Art History and German from the University of Maine and her MA from FSU, Heath completed her PhD at Brown University in 2005, having conducted extensive research in France with the support of the Kress Foundation for her dissertation, Architecture, Ritual, and Identity in the Cathedral Saint-Etienne and the Abbey of Saint-Germain in Auxerre, France. She joined Hope College in 2007 as Assistant Professor, served as director of the gallery of the DePree Art Center from 2007 to 2012, and has served as faculty mentor of the Mellon Scholars Program since 2010. She has received numerous grants and awards for teaching and for her research, which focuses on the cultural, artistic and spatial dynamics of architecture and urban space in medieval cities. Her scholarship has most recently appeared in the journal of medieval studies, Speculum, in 2015.
This year Professor Heath initiated an interdisciplinary project with Hope students reconstructing the architecture, decoration and music of Auxerre, France, and its churches through 3D modeling, recordings, drawings and interactive maps. In the summer of 2016, she and Mellon Scholar Jonathan Bading will collaborate on reconstructing the artistic environment of La Trinité abbey in Vendôme, France. Heath is also currently working on a book length study of the visual and performance culture of Benedictine monasticism in the late Middle Ages.
The Department of Art History at FSU is proud to have played a part in this outstanding scholar’s background. Recalling with fond appreciation her graduate school beginnings at FSU, Dr. Heath writes:
In one way or another, I call on my FSU education at work every day. Whether I am reaching for a class notebook, giving a bit of advice that was handed to me from professors, or calling on the life-long friends I made during my time in Tallahassee, FSU is never far from my mind. I am so grateful that I spent two wonderful years learning in such a terrific environment.
