Visiting Scholars
Each year the Department of Art History hosts distinguished national and international scholars in lecture series and as part of our Annual Graduate Student Symposium.
Upcoming Lecturers
Check back in the fall for upcoming events!
Past Lecturers
Richard J. Powell
John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University. “Blackbeats: Cubism Reimagined,” 40th Annual Graduate Symposium, Keynote. March 1, 2024.
Antoinette Jackson
Professor & Chair, USF Department of Anthropology, and Director of the USF Living Heritage Institute. “Heritage, Tourism, and Race,” MCHS Forum. February 22, 2024.
Joshua Cohen
Associate Professor of Art History, City College of New York & CUNY Graduate Center. “African Modernism in an Opaque Field of Production.” January 31, 2024.
Heather Igloliorte
Associate Professor of Indigenous Art History and University Research Chair of Circumpolar Indigenous Art, Concordia University, Montreal. “Qummit Qukiria / Up Like a Bullet: The Rise of Contemporary Circumpolar Indigenous Art.” 39th Annual Graduate Symposium, Keynote. March 3, 2023.
Roland Betancourt
Professor of Art History and Chancellor’s Fellow, University of California, Irvine. “The Case of Manuel I Komnenos: Gender, Sexuality, and Racialization in Byzantium.” 38th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. April 8, 2022.
Charlene Villaseñor Black
Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Decolonizing Art History with Mexico’s ‘Tenth Muse,’ Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” 37th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. March 5, 2021.
Michele Bogart
Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University. “Thinking Differently About Statues.” 36th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.”
27th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote.
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,”
26th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. 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.” 25th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. 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,”
24th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. 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,”
24th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium, Keynote. February 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.