Recent Faculty News

Daniela Bleichmar held a Getty Foundation Non-Residential Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2008-2009, She spent the academic year as a visitor in the History Department at Harvard University, where she completed the manuscript for her first monograph, Visible Empire: Colonial Botany and Visual Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. In Fall 2008, Stanford University Press published Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800, which Daniela co-edited. In this past year, Daniela received an honorable mention in the Prize for Young Scholars awarded by International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science, for the best dissertation on any topic in western civilization for the period 2004-2008. In December 2008, she received the USC College General Education Teaching Award for a new course she taught the previous year, Art History 128g, “Arts of Latin America, Colonial to Contemporary” (TAs: Stephanie Schneider and Sarah Goodrum). In 2008-2009, Daniela presented her work at venues including the Clark Library (Los Angeles), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), the Royal Society (London), and the annual History of Science Society meeting. She gave the keynote lectures at two conferences, “Natural Dialogues: Art, Science, & Material Culture,” at the Yale Center for British Art, and “Nature as Image and Resource in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Spanish America,” at Queen’s University Belfast. Daniela will be on maternity leave during the Fall 2009 semester, and on Junior Faculty Research Leave for the Spring 2010 semester.

Selma Holo’s show of the LA Artist, Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings 1979-2009, will open at the Fisher Museum of Art on September 8. Her new book, Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values   will be coming out in October or November.  It will be published by AltaMira Press and her co-editor is Maite Alvarez, a USC Ph.D.

Karen Lang has been appointed the next Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the College Art Association's flagship journal of art history. She will serve as Editor Designate from July 1, 2009- June 30, 2010, as Editor-in-Chief from July 1, 2010-June 30, 2013, and as Past Editor form July 1, 2013-June 30, 1014.

Carolyn Malone will serve as Departmental Chair from 2009-2012. In the Spring of 2009 she published Saint-Bénigne de Dijon en l’an mil, “totius Gallie basilicis mirabilior”: interprétation politique, liturgique et théologique, in Brepols series : Disciplina monastica 5, eds. Susan Boynton and Isabelle Cochelin (Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2009). This complements her publication in the Spring of 2008 of Saint-Bénigne et sa rotonde : archéologie d’une église bourguignonne de l’an mil (Editions universitaires, Dijon, 2008). Her article “Saint-Bénigne de Dijon: Le programme des dédicaces de la rotonde,” Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 60 (2009) also appeared in the Spring of 2009. She is currently co-editing with Clark Maines (Wesleyan University) a collection of inter-disciplinary essays on Medieval customaries and monastic life and liturgy which were presented in June of 2007 at the Chateau de la Bretesche in Brittany, France. She received an Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation Grant to organize the conference and produce this publication.

Alexander Marr has accepted USC’s offer to come to USC in 2010 from St. Andrew’s University. He researches the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of art and architecture in the Early Modern period and recently completed Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).  Previous publications include Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2006) and The Worlds of Oronce Fine: Mathematics, Instruments and Print in Renaissance France (2009).  His next project is a history of the concept of 'ingenuity' in Early Modern Europe.

Richard Meyer is photographed above with the Guerrilla Girls last February at the 2009 CAA reception for award recipients; the Guerrilla Girls received CAA’s inaugural Distinguished Feminist Award, and Richard was presented with the Art Journal Award for his insightful essay, “ ‘Artists sometimes have feelings,’ ” published in the Winter 2008 issue as part of a larger forum focused on working with living artists. In the Spring Richard became Director of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate Program, and this summer organized a dissertation writing group for ABD students. Richard is currently at work on two book projects. The first, titled What was Contemporary Art?, traces the concept of contemporary art in the United States from Alfred Barr's course on modern art at Wellesley College in 1927 to the recent emergence of "the contemporary" as a field of specialization within art history. The second book, co-edited with the artist/critic Catherine Lord, charts the volatile dialogue between modern art and homosexuality from the late 19th century until today. Titled Art and Queer Culture, 1885 to the Present, it will be published in Phaidon’s “Themes and Movements” series. Last year, Richard also currated "Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered” for the Jewish Museum in New York City (March-August, 2008) and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (October 2008 - January 2009). The catalogue to the exhibition is co-published and distributed by Yale University Press. Continuing the Warhol theme, Richard co-curated (with Ariadni Liokatis) "Looking into Andy Warhol's Photographic Legacy" at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. Rather than using conventional wall text, the exhibit cited Warhol's own voice (as culled from his diaries and other writings) to comment upon the scenes, themes, and people he photographed. The opening of the show was the occasion for "The Warhol Party" (held at Fisher Museum, and attended by many revelers in town for the College Art Association meeting) which was organized by The Contemporary Project and cosponsored by the Department of Art History, the Roski School of Fine Arts, the International Museum Institute, the Center for Transformative Scholarship, and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate.

Megan O’Neil will be an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art from 2009 to 2011. During this fellowship, she plans to complete several publications. In addition to articles on ancient Maya representation of ancestors and the ceremonial use of sculpture and architecture, she will complete her book, The Lives of Ancient Maya Sculptures: Objects of History, Objects of Ritual, and a two-article set, “Engaging Maya Sculptures of Piedras Negras, Guatemala,” projects developed with a J. Paul Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship during the academic year 2007-2008. Megan’s essay, “Ancient Maya Sculptures of Tikal, Seen and Unseen,” will be published in Fall 2009 in the forthcoming issue (55/56) of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. Forthcoming in 2010 are “Image and Experience in the Country of Nopal and Maguey: Collecting and Portraying Mexico in Two Nineteenth-Century French Albums,” to be published in Collecting Across Cultures, edited by USC colleagues Peter Mancall and Daniela Bleichmar; and “The World of the Ancient Maya and the Worlds They Made,” (co-authored with Mary E. Miller), in Fiery Pool:  The Maya and the Mythic Sea..

John Pollini was appointed a Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology in 2009. He also received for 2009-20010 a generous grant from USC’s “Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Initiative.” The grant will allow him and his assistant Nicholas Cipolla to complete a virtual reality computer project focusing on the Augustan Monuments of the Northern Campus Martius in Rome. Through the 3-dimensional models of these structures the modern viewer will be able to experience them in context from various viewing angles, as the ancient viewer would have seen them. John has given papers on his project and the application of this new technology at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco and at two international conferences (“Seeing the Past” at Stanford University and “Making Ambiguity Explicit in Virtual Reconstructions” at the British Academy and the University of London), and he has lectured on his findings at Cambridge University. In conjunction with this virtual reality project, John will be exploring narratological issues from new points of view and advancing a number of original ideas about the content and meaning of these monuments, which are among the most important creations of Roman art. The DVD produced in connection with this innovative project will be part of his book, Dynastic Narratives in Augustan Art and Thought: The Rhetoric and Poetry of Visual Imagery, which is in progress. In addition, John recently received a $7,000 subvention from the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation for his book From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome, to be published this year by the University of Oklahoma Press. He has recently completed the following articles based on conference papers recently presented: “Love-Making and Voyeurism in Roman Art and Culture: A Case for the House of the Centenary at Pompeii;” “Recutting Roman Portraits: Problems in Interpretation and the New Technology in Finding Possible Solutions;”“Archaeology of Destruction: Christians, Images of Classical Antiquity, and Some Problems of Interpretation.”

Sean Roberts, a historian of early modern European art, was awarded a USC/Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Faculty Fellowship for 2009-2010. His research focuses on Italian printmaking and cartography and span wide chronological and geographic boundaries to include the relationship between the histories of representation, identity, and ideology across Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Examination of the implicit tensions between local history and frameworks of cultural interaction in visual culture provides a unifying thread to this range of topics. I am presently finishing a book on manuscript and printed maps deployed as diplomatic gifts between the Italian city-states and the Ottoman Empire.

Nancy J. Troy held fellowships during 2007 and 2008 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she was the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor. She was pursuing research for her book, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, which was nearing completion as Summer 2009 drew to a close. A related essay, "Mondrian and the Money," will appear in a Dutch publication devoted to Mondrian's last, unfinished painting, Victory Boogie Woogie. This fall, Nancy is teaching a graduate seminar that examines Mondrian's position in art history and historiography, particularly the reception and circulation of his work in the US in the post-World War II period. The ways in which that work has been presented in exhibitions, publications, and in pop culture forms will also receive some attention in the graduate seminar Nancy plans to teach in the Spring, on art, business and the law. Potential projects growing out of her research on Mondrian include an exhibition ("Piet Mondrian, High and Low"), a book on the Mondrian Hotel, and further research on how conservation impacts the ways in which works of art are valued and presented in museums, commercial galleries, and other settings.

Ann Marie Yasin specializes in Roman and late antique art and material culture and holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Classics and Art History. Her primary research interests include monuments and commemoration; social lives of ancient objects and buildings; material culture of ancient religion; and the history of collecting and displaying Roman and early Christian antiquities. Her recent book, Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community (Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming Oct. 2009), studies the social functions of sacred space in the early Christian world. Her next major book project is a co-authored comparative study of Archaeologies of Sacred Space, 500 B.C.E.-500 C.E. (Yale Univ. Press). She is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Classical Antiquity and serves as Associate Editor of Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture for the Cambridge World History of Religious Architecture. In addition to undergraduate classes on Greek, Roman, and late antique art and archaeology, she has offered recent graduate seminars on Building and Displaying Ancient Rome, Collecting the Sacred, Late Antique Cityscapes, Monuments and Cultural Memory, Image and Narrative in Late Antiquity, and Late Antique Sacred Space and Religious Architecture. For 2009-2010 she serves as Graduate Advisor in the Classics Department.