2024 Newsletter

Letter from the Department Head

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Penn State! It’s a pleasure to update you on the great work done over the past year in our Art History community.

This summer Maggie Borowitz and Oh Mee Lee joined our department to teach Latin American Art and East Asian Art, respectively, while Amara Solari and Chang Tan are on fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery. As we welcomed them, we said goodbye to Lauren Taylor, who left Penn State for the University of Pittsburgh, her alma mater. And this fall Emily Sikora, who quickly became a beloved fixture in the department, left for a position in the division of Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State. Sadly, Tony Cutler passed away at the age of ninety in June. He remained curious about activities in the department to the end and we will miss his example of scholarly engagement.

Last year, the department graduated 56 Art History majors, art history minors, and architectural history minors. The College of Arts and Architecture’s class marshal this spring was art history major, Rónan Shaw, who led the procession into Eisenhower Auditorium for the ceremony. Rónan is now pursuing an art history graduate degree at the University of Florida. He was joined by Megan Neely, our department class marshal, who is pursuing her graduate degree at Florida State. We’re incredibly proud of these two new Floridians! We celebrated 5 MA students who completed their degrees, and this fall we welcomed new undergraduate majors and pre-majors as well as a new cohort of graduate students.

Art History Graduation Reception 2024

Art history students studied in Todi again this year, led by PhD student Emily Hagen, and majors studied abroad in many other places aided by scholarships from the Townley Fellowship. The Susan W. and Thomas A. Schwartz Dissertation Research Fellowship enabled Arielle Fields to advance work on her dissertation last spring and Han Chen to do so this fall. The Babcock Galleries and Francis E. Hyslop Memorial fund supported Kyle Marini’s research in Ecuador and Spain. Lousie D. Purcell Memorial funds allowed Emily Hagen to travel to Berlin to see an exhibit of Maartin van Heemskerk drawings. Funds in the General Scholarship Fund from Jerilea Zempel enabled Kate McCowan and Adrienne Krueger to conduct research on Native American Art in the western United States.

Todi Study Abroad

Lindsay Cook and Anne Cross led a bus trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Students in Professor Cook’s Byzantine Art survey attended a landmark exhibition on Africa & Byzantium, while those in Professor Cross’s course on The Harlem Renaissance visited The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. This fall, thanks to the generosity of the newly created Drew Stewart Popjoy Fund for Travel and Experiential Learning, the department was able to fund Professor Cross to take her “Visualizing the Civil War and Its Aftermath” class to Gettysburg and Heather McCune Bruhn to take her First Year Seminar to the Corning Museum of Glass. Thanks to this Fund and a grant from the College Art Association’s Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions, Lindsay Cook will be taking her graduate seminar on “Theories and Practices of Conservation” to Paris in January to see the newly reopened cathedral of Notre Dame. Through opportunities like these, the Popjoy Fund promises to transform learning in the department.

Metropolitan Museum of Art bus trip

Our students continued their extraordinary record of presentations at national and international conferences. Art History majors presented at the Pennsylvania Intercollegiate Art History Symposium last April and the SECAC conference. Graduate students gave presentations at the Association for Asian Studies Conference, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art/Dahesh Museum of Art Graduate Symposium, College Art Association Conference, the Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art at the Barnes Foundation, the Renaissance Society of America Conference, and the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, among others.

The Center for Virtual and Material Studies continued to spur new inquiry and approaches to art history. In May, the Center hosted a Colonial Transatlantic Pigment Group, which brought together an international roster of scholars. The Center continued its collaboration with the Fashion Archive in the School of Theatre, sponsoring student interns over the summer. Its lectures and workshops, and its outreach to universities and non-academic entities across the country make it ever more important in the life of the department.

I am immensely grateful to the strong support of our alumni and friends who make so much possible. You play a vital part in the life of our department in so many ways. I send warmest wishes for a happy 2025!

Sincerely,

Alumni Updates

See what our incredible alumni are doing out in the world.

Undergraduate Studies

See what our undergraduate students accomplished this past year.

Graduate Studies

See how our graduate students are engaging with research and advancing their fields.

Faculty and Staff

Our faculty and staff keep our department moving forward. See accomplishments over the past year.

Center for Virtual/Material Studies

See the research that CVMS has engaged in this past year.

The Palmer Museum of Art

Harold E. Dickson Memorial Lectures Series

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