Faculty & Staff 2024 Newsletter

Faculty & Staff News

New Members of the Department

Maggie Borowitz (she/her/hers) who joined the department this fall, is an art historian focusing on modern and contemporary Latin American art. Her research explores the relationship between art and politics in the late twentieth century with special emphasis on feminist practices in Mexico. She comes to Penn State from the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in art history in 2022 and held a postdoctoral teaching fellowship from 2022–24.

She is currently at work on a book manuscript titled “Magali Lara: Feminist Artistic Tactics and the Mexican 1980s,” which investigates the political potency of expressions of female subjectivity through a study of the art of Magali Lara. She has also been working on a new project that thinks expansively about the relationship between representations of gender and sexuality and Mexican nationality through an interdisciplinary study of the color Mexican Pink, and she’s in the midst of co-curating an exhibition of contemporary Chicago-based artists whose work engages with tensions between femininity and feminism. Provisionally called “Girl Stuff,” the exhibition will open in the Chicago gallery space Tiger Strikes Asteroid in February 2025.

At Penn State, Dr. Borowitz is teaching courses that investigate the art and architecture of the Americas across time, from the pre-colonial period to the present. She has been enjoying getting to know Penn State students, taking advantage of the Palmer Museum’s collection and exhibitions, and, after fifteen years in Chicago, exploring Happy Valley’s topography and dark sky.

Oh Mee Lee (she/her/hers) who joined the department this fall, specializes in art and art-historical literature of late-Tang dynasty China. Her expertise spans from theories, histories, and historiographies of Chinese and Korean calligraphy and painting to translations and copying of landscapes, real and inked.

A graduate of Meadville Area Senior High (MASH), Meadville, PA, Oh Mee received her Ph.D. in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), her M.A. from the University of Oregon, and her B.A. from Bates College. Before arriving at Penn State, she taught general education courses in art history and specialized courses in Asian art at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she discovered an original, late-Shang dynasty bronze wine vessel, c. 1600–1046 BCE, and an album of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints in the University of Arkansas Museum, around which she designed several courses and exhibitions.

Dr. Lee’s research takes a deep dive into the processes of transferring skills and philosophies from calligraphy to landscape painting, while attempting to translate personal and physical experiences. She works equally as adeptly with theoretical and historical or classical texts as she does with materials and processes.

At Penn State, ever gravitating toward hands-on research and undergraduate research potential, Dr. Lee is currently investigating an early Ming dynasty painting at the Palmer Museum, thinking about Silla Korean cut-out ceramics, supervising an honors student in Chinese art, and contributing what she can to the history and future of Asian art, Asian studies, integrative arts, and the relevance of premodern art and art history. Oh Mee is excited to engage each of her students in all that Asian art studies has to offer. In spring 2025, she will teach “Taste and Criticism (of Asian Art)” and “(Premodern) Asian Art and Architecture.”

Lindsay Cook made progress on her monograph and submitted several manuscripts, including an edited volume about Gothic architectural space, a major article about medievalism in African American architecture, and a theoretical essay about digital heritage. After conducting research in France for a new project about the cultivation of the woad plant in medieval Amiens and its links to the local Gothic cathedral, she presented her findings at the ICMS in Kalamazoo, SAH Virtual 2024, an O’Brien Workshop at Rice University, and a Department of Art History Tea at Penn State. Lindsay also gave invited lectures about Notre-Dame of Paris at Villa Albertine (New York), the Boston Public Library and North Bennet Street School (Boston), the APT-DVC 2024 Biennial Symposium & TTRAG Open Conference (Lancaster), La Résidence de France (Beverly Hills), the Timber Framers Guild Conference (Ann Arbor), and the University Museum at Texas Southern University (Houston). Notably, she presented the opening lecture in the Archaeology Now series Notre-Dame: A Wider World in October, delivered the keynote at the Association for Preservation Technology and National Trust for Canada 2024 Joint Conference in Montreal in November, and will close out the year with a webinar at the Kharkiv School of Architecture. Thanks to the grant Lindsay received from the College Art Association’s Art History Fund for Travel to Special Exhibitions, her graduate seminar Medieval Art: Theories & Practices of Conservation will travel to Paris in January 2025 to see two special exhibitions about Notre-Dame at the Musée de Cluny and visit the cathedral itself shortly after it reopens to the public.

In February 2024, Anne Strachan Cross was invited to share her research and moderate a panel as part of the 2024 Elizabeth and Irwin Warren Folk Art Symposium organized by the American Folk Art Museum. Titled, “The Picture is Still Out There: Reframing Black Presence in the Collections of Early American Art and Material Culture,” this event was organized in conjunction with the exhibition Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North, for which Cross was a contributing catalogue author. In spring 2024, Cross was also awarded a Racial Justice, Anti-Discrimination, and Democratic Practices Grant from the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. This award supports Cross’s ongoing research into the histories and circulation of the infamous photograph of a formerly enslaved man named Peter Gordon, also known as “The Scourged Back.” This case study is the subject of chapter one of Cross’s current book manuscript, Mediating Atrocity: Photography, Violence, and the Civil War Press, which examines photographs of atrocity and their publication as wood engravings within Harper’s Weekly’s illustrated reporting of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Beyond her research and teaching, Cross serves as co-chair of the Photography Network (PN)—a U.S.-based, global scholarly community that fosters discussion, research, and new approaches to the study and practice of photography. In summer 2024, Cross helped secure a major grant from the Terra Foundation to fund the 2024 PN symposium at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson, Arizona. Cross is also a co-organizer of a working group of scholars dedicated to revising the American Art survey through anti-racist and decolonizing methodologies, and as part of these efforts she helped lead a workshop on “Rethinking the Survey: Place-Based Approaches to Art History,” at the Eighth Biennial Symposium of the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) in Birmingham, Alabama, in October 2024.

In April, in Toronto, James Harper presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in a session titled “New Directions in Eighteenth-Century Culture.” His "new direction" involved using Artificial Intelligence to reconstruct the appearance of monuments that are lost or that were never built. Collaborating with the Rotterdam-based technology innovation consultant Linda Ricci, Harper used the 500-word text in which artist Giuseppe Ceracchi describes the "Monument to American Liberty" that the U.S. Congress considered erecting in the 1790s. The images generated by careful prompting are, Harper concluded, helpful in reintegrating this monument into art history, even if the visualization remains speculative.

In October, wearing his Museum Studies hat, Harper spoke on a panel at the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums in Philadelphia. The panel, addressing the training of the next generation of museum professionals, turned out to be a Penn State reunion of sorts; one of the other speakers was Ellen Owens, a Penn State grad who is now the director of the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University.

Nancy Locke published the catalogue essay “Madame Auguste Manet and the Painting of Modern Life,” as well as several catalogue entries and biographical sketches, in Manet: A Model Family, edited by Diana Seave Greenwald. The exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, includes numerous paintings and works on paper depicting members of Manet’s family, and the inspiration for the exhibition was Professor Locke’s 2001 book, Manet and the Family Romance. The Gardner Museum/Princeton University Press publication includes technical analysis of the recently cleaned portrait of Manet’s mother (from the Gardner collection) as well as new research by Locke and other Manet scholars on members of Manet’s family. One key example Locke researched is a brilliant 1879 portrait of Jules Dejouy, a cousin of Manet’s. Dejouy was an appeals court lawyer and close confidant of Manet and his brothers, and the portrait, recently donated to the National Museum of Wales, had never been exhibited in the United States.

Professor Locke’s other projects include an article in the works on the visual culture of the boulevard du Prince-Eugène (now boulevard Voltaire) in the mid-nineteenth century in Paris, and a contribution to the 2025 exhibition Cézanne: Jas de Bouffan at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence, France, an exhibition that will commemorate the reopening of Cézanne’s familial home, the Jas de Bouffan. Her book, Cézanne’s Shadows: Poussin, Chardin, Rubens, will appear in early 2025 with Penn State University Press.

Carolyn Lucarelli, manager of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies (CVMS), continued her collaboration with Charlene Gross (associate professor of costume design in the School of Theatre) to create a publicly accessible digital inventory of the School of Theatre Fashion Archive, a hands-on collection of clothing and fashion accessories dating from 1850-1990. Together, Lucarelli and Gross were awarded a Student Engagement Network (SEN) Group Grant in collaboration with the Max and Shirley Kogan Museum Experience Fund, which supported a new Fashion Archive Internship Experience for two undergraduate students for the summer of 2024. The internship provided an opportunity for the students to gain experience working in the Fashion Archive and the CVMS and to visit both local and national museum textile collections and facilities to introduce them to the possibilities within the field of museum studies. See this Penn State News article to learn more about this unique experience.

At the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) annual conference in Pittsburgh in April, Lucarelli and CVMS research assistant Catherine Adams presented a poster titled “Let It Boyll: A Contemporary Investigation into the Barclay Dye Recipes Manuscript,” highlighting the center’s research into the late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century Scottish manuscript and their efforts to reproduce historic dye recipes from it.

In the spring of 2024, Elizabeth Mansfield taught a new undergraduate course on AI and Art History. In this general education course, students were introduced to the history of art via questions related to technology, artistic identity, and the significance of “art” for human cultures. Later that spring, she led a convening of more than forty scholars at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia on June 15 and 16 on the topic of “AI and Art History Today.” With Emily Pugh (Getty Research Institute), Mansfield co-chaired two sessions on the theme “Virtual/Material: What Matters for Art History?” at the June meeting of CIHA (Comité international d’histoire de l’art) in Lyon, France. The special section of Art Bulletin that Mansfield edited on Art History after Computer Vision appeared in September. This special section included a contribution by John Russell, associate director of CVMS, as well as an introduction by Mansfield. She submitted two chapters for publication: “Social Art History: The Doing and Un-Doing of a Discipline” for a forthcoming collection on art historical methodology edited by Geraldine Johnson (Oxford University) and an essay on realism and AI-based image generation co-authored with the Constable’s Clouds research group (Max Mehta, James Wang, Jia Li, Shuhua Yang, John Russell, and Catherine Adams) for a volume of proceedings to be published by the British Academy. On sabbatical during academic year 2024-25, Mansfield is focused on completing a draft of a new book, tentatively titled Empiricism and the Visual Imagination.

Erica Nodell, administrative coordinator, continued managing all things art history and was honored to receive 2nd prize in the 1st Annual Arts & Architecture Pumpkin Carving Contest for her version of the Mona Lisa.

Amara Solari published two co-authored books this year, Maya Christian Murals in Early Modern Yucatán (The University of Texas Press, 2024), co-authored with Linda Williams, and The Friar and the Maya: Diego de Landa and the Account of the Things of Yucatan (The University of Colorado Press, 2023), written with Matthew Restall, John Chuchiak, and Traci Ardren. The former was supported by a four-year collaborative grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the CAA’s Millard Meiss Publication Grant, and the George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment. The latter recently won the María Elena Martinez Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association for the year’s top book in Mexican history. In the fall, Amara embarked on two fellowships – the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (The National Gallery of Art) and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship – to continue work on her next book, Missions Impossible: The Art of Franciscan Failure and Pueblo Perseverance in Nuevo México. This fall, she visited the University of Florida as a Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History. Her co-curated exhibition (with Christopher Heaney), Re-collecting the Andes, opened at the Palmer Museum of Art. This exhibition stemmed from a new co-taught course that studied the legacies of American collecting practices of Andean cultural heritage. The undergraduate and graduate students worked tirelessly to make the exhibition a success. She recently returned from Mérida, where The Friar and the Maya was formerly presented to the Yucatecan community.

Chang Tan published her first monograph, The Minjian Avant-Garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China (Cornell University Press), in December 2023. The book received generous support from the George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment. In September 2024, she had a most pleasant conversation with College of Arts and Architecture Dean B. Stephen Carpenter about the book, the recording of which can be found here. She also gave a book talk at the Open Humanities and Digital Dialogue Series at Heidelberg University (June 12). Her article, “Rewriting the Heart Sutra: Buddhism and the (Geo)Politics of Symbols in Qiu Zhijie’s Art,” was published in positions: asia critique (August 2024). She has received fellowships from the Center for Humanities and Information (spring 2024, Penn State) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2024-25, National Gallery of Art), which allow her to continue working on her next book project, tentatively titled Network Moderns: Photography and Vernacular Artmaking in Global Chinas. She is enjoying her residency in Washington, D.C. and making progress on the project.

In February, Robin Thomas had the privilege of discussing his second book, Palaces of Reason: the Royal Architecture of Bourbon Naples with Dean B. Stephen Carpenter at the Woskob Family Gallery. The conversation, with so many friends in attendance, was a highlight of his career and a recording can be found here. An article that reflected on how the pandemic brought about changes in scholarly approaches to architectural history appeared in The Brooklyn Rail last spring. In September, “Luigi Vanvitelli fra tradizione e originalità” was published in the conference proceedings, Luigi Vanvitelli, il Maestro e la sua eredità 1773-2023. A second article, “Displaying the Ancient World in the Royal Palaces of Naples,” appeared in the catalogue for the exhibition, The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples, held at the Meadows Museum in Dallas. He continued to conduct research on his next book project, “The City in the Age of the Enlightenment,” with trips to Dublin and London in May and Lisbon in October. Finally, he was invited by department alumna, Kathryn McClintock, to teach two classes for the Oscher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) and was pleased to connect with alumni and friends of Penn State through that experience.

After forty-three years of teaching, Craig Zabel is retiring at the end of fall semester, 2024. He has spent thirty-nine of these years at Penn State, including twenty-one years as head of the Department of Art History, and three semesters as an interim associate dean for undergraduate studies and outreach in the College of Arts and Architecture. During his time at Penn State, he has been recognized by the University with the Graduate Program Chair Leadership Award and the Teaching Fellow Award (The Alumni Association and Student Award for Excellence in Teaching). His parting thought is borrowed from Chaucer: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

In December the department celebrated Dr. Zabel’s service to the department with an event that brought many friends and former students back to Penn State. Speakers shared stories and tributes to Dr. Zabel in an event that was followed by a reception in the Borland Building.