Welcome to New Members of the Department

In the fall of 2023, we welcomed Dr. Anne Strachan Cross to our faculty. Dr. Cross (she/her/hers) is an art historian specializing in American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the histories of photography and the material culture of illustrated newspapers and magazines. Originally from the Chicagoland area, Dr. Cross received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware (2023); her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU (2013); and her B.A. from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU (2009).

In her writing and teaching, Cross critically engages the impact racial and gender bias has on the archival and narrative practices of history, and she employs innovative methodologies that create space for themes of recovery and redress, and the dynamics of absence and presence. Her work has appeared in the journals Panorama, History of Photography, and Civil War History, and her current book project examines photographs of atrocity and their publication as wood engravings within Harper’s Weekly’s illustrated reporting of the American Civil War.

At Penn State, Dr. Cross teaches courses across the broad history of American art, including the 300-level lecture on "American Art and Society," and forthcoming seminars on "The Harlem Renaissance" and "The Civil War and American Art." Dr. Cross offers this reflection upon her first semester at Penn State: “As a recent Ph.D., I could not have asked for a better department in which to begin my career, than that at Penn State. The other faculty members have been incredibly welcoming and collegial, and I am continually impressed by my students’ level of enthusiasm and engagement for the topics of American art history.” She continues: “As a scholar who is deeply invested in interrogating art history’s historical and ongoing engagements with racist ideologies, I particularly look forward to supporting Penn State’s ongoing efforts to advance a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive field.”

Emily Sikora is a recent addition to the staff of the Department of Art History, serving as an administrative support assistant. As a Penn State alumna, Emily is enthusiastic to return to her alma mater to support an excellent department.

Faculty and Staff News

Catherine Adams is the digital support specialist in the Center for Virtual/Material Studies. Over the past year she has helped graduate student assistants in the CVMS work on various material and digital projects and overseen the work of undergraduate interns in the School of Theatre Fashion Archive. Catherine maintains various digital collections for the department and CVMS at https://exhibitions.psu.edu. She also organizes the various physical supplies for the research needs of the center. She is as Dr. Rich says, “the finder and keeper of things.”

Heather McCune Bruhn was promoted to associate teaching professor in spring 2022 and awarded an Incentives and Innovations Course Enhancement grant in summer 2022. By utilizing grant funding and conference funding together, Heather was able to perform additional research around conference presentations. She organized and moderated a session at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds and presented two papers at an international educational technology conference in Seville. The purpose of the Incentives and Innovations grant was to add more diversity, equity, and inclusion to Art History 112 online. This traditionally Western survey made its debut in fall 2023 with new global content based on Heather’s research. The student response has been very positive. The research trips also provided a great deal of material for Heather’s new course, Art History 101, Introduction to Global Art History (approved by Faculty Senate in August 2023). That course makes its online debut in spring 2024. During the summer, Heather participated in two teaching retreats, one on enhancing course materials with technology and the other on promoting global learning. Heather has also published book reviews (in Choice and Mediavistik) in the past year and co-authored an article with Sarah J. Townsend on teaching about gold as a commodity chain. Her article on the sources for medieval goldsmithwork (based on a paper presented in January 2022) should be published by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte by the end of this year.

Lindsay Cook joined the faculty in fall 2022 as assistant teaching professor of architectural history. Since then, she has published “The Image of Notre-Dame: Architectural and Artistic Responses to the Cathedral of Paris” in the edited volume The Analysis of Gothic Architecture (Brill), the article “Traces of the Medieval Working Class in the Land of the Paris Cathedral Chapter” in the medieval art history journal Different Visions, a catalogue entry about a rare 13th-century Limoges Eucharistic dove in the collection catalogue Making & Meaning: The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, a review of the edited volume The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture in CAA Reviews, and a review of Maile Hutterer’s monograph Framing the Church in Architectural History. Related to her own monograph in progress, Like the Sun Among Stars: Architectural and Artistic Responses to Notre-Dame of Paris, Cook delivered the lecture “Encadrer Notre-Dame” at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris in March 2023. Over the course of the spring and summer, she visited the two workshops where the Notre-Dame spire was made before being transported to Paris for installation, and she climbed the cathedral itself with the restoration architect overseeing the reconstruction of the roof and spire in the aftermath of the catastrophic 2019 fire. The elaborate graphics she consulted on that first appeared in the February 2022 cover story of National Geographic have been on view in front of Notre-Dame since spring 2023, making clear and accurate information about the building’s past, present, and near future available to a wide public.

James Harper, associate research professor of art history and director of Museum Studies, consulted on and wrote part of the catalogue for a major international exhibition on the influence of Pope Urban VIII and his family on the development of baroque culture. Titled L'Immagine Sovrana: Urbano VIII e i Barberini, the exhibition was up from March to July at Italy's National Gallery of Art (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome). He also published a review of Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi in CAA Reviews in September 2023, and a review of Raphael, The Power of Renaissance Images: The Dresden Tapestries and their Impact in the winter issue of HALI, the international journal of textile art. This was the year that face-to-face academic conferences resumed, and Harper jumped back in with gusto, delivering a paper on Ferrante Carlo at the annual Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and chairing a session on "Depicting the Americas: European Ideologies and Cross-Cultural Exchange" at the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America.

Nancy Locke spent several weeks in Paris during her sabbatical in fall 2022 doing research for her contributions to the exhibition catalogue Manet’s Model Family. The exhibition, curated by Diana Seave Greenwald, is set to open in November 2024 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prof. Locke’s archival research will shed new light on portraits by Édouard Manet of his mother Eugénie (née Fournier) and his cousin Jules de Jouy, a lawyer for the Paris court of appeals. Prof. Locke’s next book, Cézanne’s Shadows, is forthcoming from Penn State University Press in early 2025.

Carolyn Lucarelli, manager of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies (CVMS), was awarded the Visual Resources Association (VRA) Project Grant in Fall 2022. This allowed the CVMS to continue the collaborative project with the School of Theatre Fashion Archive, started the previous summer, to create a publicly accessible digital inventory of the archive. The grant funded two art history undergraduate students through the spring of 2023 to work in the archive, cataloging and photographing garments and accessories and learning to clean and care for historic pieces.

In January 2023, Lucarelli received the College of Arts and Architecture’s Rusinko Kakos Student Success Grant to fund two additional undergraduate students for the 2023 summer and fall semesters to continue the work in the Fashion Archive. This work provides an avenue outside of the classroom for the students to garner transferable skills as well as gain hands-on training in collection management and textile conservation, digital literacy, and research methods.

Lucarelli also co-authored an article, “The Life Cycle of Visual Assets: Advocating for the Profession,” published in the June 2023 issue of the VRA Bulletin.

Elizabeth Mansfield, professor of art history, continued her NEH-funded project, After Constable’s Clouds, in collaboration with colleagues in computer science and the Center for Virtual/Material Studies. The group is experimenting with computer vision models to analyze and compare 19th-century European landscape paintings. She was invited to give talks on computer vision and art history at the University of Pittsburgh and Loughborough University. A review, “Field Notes: Contemporary Art History as Historiography,” appeared in the December 2022 issue of the Journal of Art Historiography. In October of 2022, Cassie accompanied undergraduate majors Jordana Bach, Sureaya Inusha, and Ronan Shaw to the Southeast College Art Conference (SECAC) in Baltimore where they presented papers developed in ARTH 350: Art History Seminar. Her Ph.D. advisee Arielle Fields delivered a paper at SECAC titled "The Nursery in 19th-Century Britain: Motherhood, Class and Identity Formation." Cassie concluded her term as department head in June 2023.

Erica Nodell, administrative coordinator, continued ensuring the smooth functioning of the office and welcomed new changes to the administrative team. She is currently on a mission to master Mozart’s Sonata K331 and raise the social ability of her cat.

Chang Tan, associate professor of art history and Asian studies, completed the editorial work for her book The Minjian Avant-garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China, which will be published by the Cornell University Press in January 2024. Supported by a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation grant for International Scholarly Exchange, she traveled to Taiwan and China to conduct research for her second monograph, which studies vernacular image-making in China and the Chinese diaspora that involves collaborations among practitioners of photography, painting, and theatre. Part of her early research on the topic, supported by the Humanities Institute at Penn State, was featured in the episode “Humanities at the Crossroads: Stories of Diversity in a Tribalized World” in the HumIn Focus series, released in October 2022. While in China, she also participated in the exhibition Blowing, Rolling, Rooting: Migration and Residence of Northwestern Artists (July 29-October 22, MOCA Yinchuan) and its related conference. In relation to her ongoing, collaborative project that focuses on land and eco art of the Sinophone world, she delivered the presentation “Land as Battlefield: Disobedience in Sinophone Eco Art” at the College Art Association Annual Conference in February 2023 and an invited webinar talk “Eco-Art in the Sinosphere” at The Brooklyn Rail in March. In April 2023, she gave a talk and a gallery tour at the USC Pacific Asia Museum on Global Asias, an exhibition she curated at the Palmer Museum of Art that had traveled to four more museums nationwide. To keep her heart racing, she started rock climbing and, in June 2023, tried rappelling for the first time at the Canyonland National Park, Utah. She survived the attempt and might try again in the future.

Lauren Taylor joined the faculty in 2022 as a jointly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Art History and Program in African Studies. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., where she provided research towards the exhibition Afro-Atlantic Histories (April 10 to July 17, 2022, National Gallery of Art) and helped to inaugurate the center’s first undergraduate internship in partnership with Howard University.

Since joining Penn State, Taylor has been writing a monograph concerning the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Over the past year, she presented different chapters of this book-in-progress on three continents, including as an invited Barkan Lecturer at Tufts University (Cambridge, MA), as well as at the annual meetings of the European Architectural History Network (Madrid, Spain; 2022) and the Meeting of the International Communications Association (Cape Town, South Africa; 2023). Her shorter form writing recently appeared in the award-winning exhibition book, African Modernism in America (Yale University Press, 2022).

Beyond her research, Taylor deepened her commitment to inclusive pedagogy over the past year as a Global Learning Faculty Fellow, sponsored by Penn State Global and the Schreyer Center for Teaching Excellence. With the support of a General Education Microgrant Award, and in collaboration with Professor Sarah Rich and teaching assistant Ian Danner, students in her class Approaches to African Art recreated the historic dying techniques used in Bamana mudcloth production as well as the weaving techniques associated with Akan Kente Cloth. In May 2023, she discussed her use of student-produced podcasting as an access-driven teaching tool at the conference Africa in the Classroom: Pedagogy, Community, Decolonization (University of Pittsburgh Center for African Studies.)

Most recently, Taylor was awarded the Global Humanities Impact Award from the Center for Global Studies at Penn State. This award will support ongoing research in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire during summer 2024.

Robin Thomas was promoted to professor and became head of the department in June 2023. Meanwhile, his second book, Palaces of Reason: the Royal Architecture of Bourbon Naples (Penn State Press) was wending its way toward publication and came out this fall. A review of Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss’s The Sun King at Sea appeared in the journal Studia borbonica in May. In September, he spoke at an international conference Luigi Vanvitelli, il Maestro e la sua eredità 1773-2023 in the Adriatic port of Ancona. The conference marked the 250th anniversary of the death of the architect. He continued to conduct research on his next book project, The City in the Age of the Enlightenment, with trips to Berlin, Mexico City, Venice, and Vienna. In January, he will officially step into the role of book review editor for Africa, Asia, and Europe before 1750 with the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. In the summer of 2023, he and his wife Stephanie (a 2010 Penn State graduate) co-hosted a Penn State alumni tour of Portugal and Spain.

Elizabeth Walters, associate professor of art history, continued her research on Hierakonpolis and gave a lecture, “Memory as Purposeful Fragments: Evidence from Temple-Town Hierakonpolis,” in May of 2022 for Ain Shams University in Cairo. Presenting along with her former student Reham Aly, she reviewed the project’s findings from 2008-15. These included geophysical (seismic) data, hydrogeologic studies and archaeological evidence, and highlighted special items, including ebony and faience found within their original context.

Craig Zabel, associate professor of art history, is retiring at the end of fall semester 2024 after 43 years of teaching. He has spent 39 of these years at Penn State, including 21 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, the Penn State Alumni Association Teaching Fellow Award, and the Student Award for Excellence in Teaching. His parting thought: “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

Daniel Zolli, assistant professor of art history, has been busy finishing the research and writing for his first, sole-authored monograph, Donatello’s Promiscuous Technique. With the loosening of COVID-related travel restrictions, he was able – at long, long last – to complete his final block of archival work in Italy, in fall 2022 and summer 2023, and is now completing the final chapter of his manuscript. During these trips to Italy he also completed much of the photography for the book. Spring 2023 saw Dan present portions of this project at conferences at the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome and Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which will be published, in expanded form, in special journal issues of W86th and Sculpture Journal. Those articles examine, respectively, the reuse of ‘waste’ in sculptors’ workshops and the collaborative dimensions of bronze casting.

Spring 2023 also saw Dan teach a new graduate seminar on Donatello, which he developed to coincide with a major exhibition on that artist at the V&A. Thanks to the support of the Department of Art History (and particularly Cassie Mansfield), as well as a grant from the College Art Association (administered by Cali Buckley PhD ’17!), Dan was able to travel with graduate students to the exhibition not once, but twice! The spring bloom also brought significant milestones for two of Dan’s advisees: Maia Martinez earned her M.A., with a superb master’s paper on Velázquez and coloniality; and Holli Turner advanced to ABD status, following a defense of her brilliant dissertation prospectus on Titian’s poesie. This fall Dan is excited to welcome doctoral student Noah Dasinger, to settle into his new role as director of undergraduate studies, and for the publication of his article on cosmetics and ‘made up’ materials in The Art Bulletin.

Bill Dewey, emeritus faculty, and his wife, Barbara, have been traveling since his retirement in January 2021. They have recently been to Paris; New Orleans; New York; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Lincoln, Nebraska; Minneapolis; and London. Following COVID restrictions, Bill hooded Janet Purdy for her Ph.D., and he has been on the dissertation defense committees for Claire Heidenreich, Karly Etz, and Christiana Usenza (Music Education). Bill continues to serve on the Palmer Museum Collections Committee. He and a young Zimbabwean archaeologist, Russell Kapumha, have written a chapter, “Ancient Arts of Southern Africa,” to be published next year in an anthology of African Art.