Visiting Scholars

Each year the Department of Art History hosts distinguished national and international scholars as part of the Vincent and Agatha Thursby Visiting Scholars Lecture Series.

Past Lecturers

Roland Betancourt
Professor of Art History and Chancellor’s Fellow, University of California, Irvine. 38th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker, April 8, 2022.

Charlene Villaseñor Black
Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. 37th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker, March 5, 2021.

Michele Bogart
Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University. 36th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker, March 8, 2019.

Cécile Fromont
Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University: “Paper, Ink, Vodun, and the Inquisition.” November 29, 2018.

Sylvester Ogbechie
Professor, Arts and Visual Cultures of Global Africa, History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara: “Restitution, Repatriation and Resolutions: African Cultural Patrimony in the Age of New Digital Image Regimes.” September 19, 2018

Robert G. Ousterhout
Professor Emeritus of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania: “The Enigma of Cappadocia.” November 28, 2017.

Edward J. Sullivan
Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of the History of Art, Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University: “Samba as Metaphor: Performativity in Brazilian Art 1960s–1990s.” 35th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker. October 6, 2017.

Glaire Anderson
Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “Scientists as ‘Makers?’ Exploring Art and Science in Islamic Spain.” February 9, 2017.

Eric Palazzo
Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, Université de Poitiers: “Saint Dominic and the Five Senses.” February 7, 2017.

Barbara E. Mundy
Professor of Art History at Fordham University: “The Book Looks Back: Living Paper, Breathing Color and Animate Material in the New World.” 34th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker. October 7, 2016.

Patricia Mainardi
Professor of art history and chair of the doctoral program in art history at the Graduate Center, The City University of New York: “Spreading the News: The Invention of the Illustrated Press in the Nineteenth Century.” April 7, 2016.

Joanna Smith
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; Consulting Scholar and Consulting Curator, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: “Exhibiting Archaeology.” October 29, 2015.

Claire Farago
Professor of Renaissance Art, Theory, & Criticism, University of Colorado at Boulder: “Rethinking Leonardo da Vinci: from Collaboration in the Workshop to the Trattato della Pittura.“ 33rd Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker. October 2, 2015.

Eric Palazzo
Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, Université de Poitiers: “Art, Liturgy, and the Five Senses in Middle Ages.” March 24, 2015.

Susan Milbrath
Curator of Latin American Art & Archaeology, Florida Museum of Natural History: “Decoding the Astronomical Narrative of the Codex Borgia.” March 21, 2015.

Amy Knight Powell
Associate Professor of Art History, University of California Irvine: “Eternity Box.” March 19, 2015.

Felipe Pereda
Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University: “Torrigiano’s Death: From Iconoclasm to Artistic Idolatry in Renaissance Spain,” 32nd Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker. October 31, 2014.

Jean Michel Massing
Head of Department in History of Art and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge: “The Influence of the Jesuit Jerome Nadal’s Evangelicae historiae imagines (1593) on 17th and 18th Century Art, from Peru to China.” October 16, 2014.

Wendy Bellion
Associate Professor of American Art and Material Culture, University of Delaware: “What Statues Remember: Art and Iconoclasm in Early New York.” April 9, 2014.

Kent Reilly
Professor of Anthropology at Texas State University and the Director of the Center for the Study of Arts and Symbolism of Ancient America: “Visions From Another Realm: Art and Ideology from the Mississippian Period Eastern Woodlands.” February 21, 2014.

John Onians
Professor Emeritus of World Art, University of East Anglia, Norwich: “Why do we Need Neuroarthistory?” November 4, 2013.

Magali Carrera
Chancellor Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth: “Notes on Research Inquiry: Absent Voices and Serendipitous Finds,” 31st Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker. October 18, 2013.

David S. Areford
Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston: “Close to Tears: the Cummer Mother of Sorrows in Detail,” January 22, 2013.

Maria Gough
Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University: ” The Para-Architectural Imagination of Gustav Klutsis,” 30th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker. October 5, 2012.

Hugh Belsey
Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London: “‘A Productive Retirement’: Thomas Gainsborough after the Royal Academy,” February 29, 2012

Elizabeth Pastan
Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University: “Picturing the Norman Conquest: Patronage and Politics of the Bayeux Embroidery,” March 15, 2012

John T. Paoletti
Kenan Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus and Professor of Art History, Emeritus, Wesleyan University:  “Naked Men in Piazza,”  29th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker   November 4, 2011

Rob Nelson
Robert Lehman Professor in the History of Art, Yale University:  “The Light of Icons,”  November 17, 2011

Darby English
Associate Professor of Art History, The University of Chicago : “Emmett Till Ever After,”  March 24, 2011

Richard Shiff
Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin: “Loss of Subject,”  28th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote Speaker  October 22, 2010

Virginia Fields
Curator of Pre-Columbian Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art:  ”From Aztlan to Olman: A Curatorial Perspective on Ancient Objects and Enduring Traditions,”  October 14, 2010

Michael Schreffler
Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University:  ”Patrons and Pictures in Colonial Cuzco,”  April 6, 2010

Elizabeth Hill Boone
Professor, Pre-Columbian & Colonial Art of Latin America, Tulane University:  ”The Afterlife of Aztec Pictography: The European Genres,”  March 23, 2010.

Alexander Nemerov
Professor in the History of Art, Yale University:  ”Art and Daily Life: A Case from 1863,”  Keynote Lecture, 27th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium,  October 23, 2009

Pamela Sheingorn
Professor Emerita, History and of Theatre Emerita, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York  “Encountering the Dying Saint Joseph: Representation, Presentation, and Cognition in the Study of an Image,”  Keynote Lecture, 26th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium  October 17, 2008

James M. Saslow
Professor of Renaissance Art and Theater, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York  ”Queen of Arts: Memoirs of a Scholar of Pleasure,”  April 10, 2008

Geoffrey Batchen
Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York  ”Snapshots: Art History and the Ethnographic Turn,”  January 24, 2008

Frederick Bohrer
Associate Professor of Art at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland  “Photography, Worldliness, and the Middle East: Then and Now,”  November 13, 2007

Helen Evans
Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator for Byzantine Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art  ”The Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai: Responses to a Sacred Space,”  November 1, 2007

Michael Leja
Professor of American Art, University of Pennsylvania  ”Winslow Homer and the Composite Image,”  Keynote Lecture, 25th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium  February 23, 2007

Terence Riley
Director, Miami Art Museum  “Modern in a Post-Modern World,”  February 1, 2007

William E. Wallace
Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History Washington University  ”Michelangelo: Artist and Aristocrat,”  November 28, 2006

Lucille Roussin
“Art Stolen, Art Reclaimed, Art Returned?”  October 19, 2006

Christina Kiaer
Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University  ”Modern Soviet Art Meets America, 1935,”  April 13, 2006

Eugene Y. Wang
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University  ”Thinking Outside the Nesting Boxes: Buddhist Reliquaries  from a Ninth-Century Chinese Crypt,”  March 2, 2006

W. J. T. Mitchell
Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor, Departments of Art History and English Language and Literature, University of Chicago  ”Sacred Images and the Holy War on Terror: Meyer Schapiro’s ‘Theme of State’ Today,”  Keynote lecture, 24th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, February 10, 2006

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, “Arcimboldo’s Serious Jokes and the Origins of Still Life Painting”  October 13, 2005

Thomas Cummins
Dumbarton Oaks Professor, History of Pre-Columbian & Colonial Art, Harvard University  ”Neither one nor the other but a third’: The Importance of Genre as Difference in Latin American Colonial Art,”  Keynote lecture, 24th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, Feb.25, 2005

Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Kay Fortson Chair in European Art, University of Texas at Austin  “The Queen of Heaven and Her Bishop: Piety in Late Fifteenth Century Germany,”  January 27, 2005

Thomas Sokolowski
Director, The Andy Warhol Museum  ”Andy Warhol: The Art of Camouflage,”  January 14, 2005

Kristine Stiles
Associate Professor of Art History, Duke University  “Crazy Horse and the Pottery Barn: Mapping the Enduring Nature and Changing States of Art Through Equine Imagery,”  November 18, 2004