Alumni Career News: Jennifer Courts

In this month’s news we are proud to feature three alumni of our PhD program who have recently accepted tenure-track faculty positions, continuing our ten-year trend of 100% placement of PhDs in careers in art history.

Jennifer E. Courts (PhD 2011) will return to the southeast as Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Southern Mississippi in Fall 2013. In addition to teaching courses in art history, Dr. Courts will continue her research on the art and architecture of Early Modern France with the generous assistance of a USM New Faculty Development Grant. She is presently completing edits to her first book project, A Desire for Representation: Painting and Identity in Fifteenth-Century France, and beginning her second, Erotic Femininity, Ideal Beauty, and Spiritual Commodity in Fifteenth-Century French Art. Her latest article, “Weaving Legitimacy: The Jouvenel des Ursins Family and Constructing Nobility in Fifteenth Century France,” will appear Summer 2013 in Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages (Brepols). In the coming year, Dr. Courts will present a paper on the iconography of French royal justice at the Southeastern College Art Conference in Greensboro, NC, and on the development of fifteenth-century panel painting as “new media” at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago.

Dr. Courts is looking forward to mentoring students and presenting new and diverse classes in her specialty at the University of Southern Mississippi, as well as the opportunity to develop ties between the Department of Art and Design and the local arts community.