In August 2023, Dr. Ashley Lindeman (PhD ’22) joined the Humanities Department faculty at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) in Overland Park, KS, as Assistant Professor of Humanities. Lindeman will be teaching such courses as Introduction to Humanities, Art of the 20^th century, and Classical Mythology. The Chair of the Humanities department shared that there were over 50 qualified candidates from the U.S. and Canada who applied for the position, but Dr. Lindeman’s outstanding teaching demonstration, her wide-ranging experience, and her connections in the Kansas City arts community made her the ideal candidate. Lindeman writes,

After adjunct teaching at JCCC for a couple of years as a PhD candidate, I was thrilled at the prospect of returning as full-time faculty after I had graduated. I am proud to have the opportunity to teach full time and mentor college students in the Kansas City metro, especially because there is a great deal of diversity on campus and the opportunities for research grants as well as teaching abroad are plentiful.

Dr. Lindeman specializes in modern art with a focus on Italian murals from the 1920s and 1930s. She completed her dissertation, “L’Arte Murale: Modern Italian Muralism in the Age of Fascism” under the direction of Dr. Adam Jolles in the fall of 2022. She is currently preparing for publication an article on the plastica murale, a Futurist mural practice that envisioned polymaterial murals for public buildings throughout the Italian peninsula in the 1930s.

Lindeman fondly remembers her time at FSU:

My rigorous graduate studies at FSU have shaped me into the art historian, instructor, and mentor I am today. Over the years, I served as a teaching assistant in courses taught by Dr. Emmerson, Dr. Freiberg, and Dr. Jolles, and I learned so much about what it means to successfully engage students in fascinating art historical subjects. Along with being a role model in the classroom, my advisor Dr. Jolles has been a wonderful mentor even post-graduation, as he provided excellent feedback while I was on the job market, and he continues to encourage me to publish my exciting findings on twentieth-century murals.

This summer, Dr. Stephanie Leitch led the 45^th international summer course at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany on the topic of Early Modern Visual Data: Organizing Knowledge in Printed Books. Leitch describes the delightful experience of working with young scholars in direct contact with the texts in the renowned library:

A group of 15 doctoral students from Europe, Asia, and the Americas joined me to inspect the kindred function of images across seemingly disparate texts. In the sixteenth century, woodcuts accompanied memory treatises, devotional texts, texts about the cosmos and the natural world, as well as manuals about the care of horses and textbooks for artists. Along with a group of seven tutors, we asked to what extent images provided the mortar between different modes of empirical investigation, and how images helped to sift, filter, and organize information.

The following podcast and video about the workshop were produced by the media team at the Herzog August Bibliothek: