Category Archives: Awards and Publications

Awards and Publications, GSAS Faculty

History of Art Professor Homay King discusses her role in new Met exhibition

China Through Looking Glass b

The new exhibition from The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, China: Through the Looking Glass, explores the influence of Chinese culture and fashion on Western designers. And the sophistication and sensitivity with which the exhibition presents the complicated nexus of exchange between East and West is, according to a recent article in the International Business Times, thanks to Homay King, Bryn Mawr History of Art Professor and Director of Program in Film Studies and Center for Visual Culture. King became involved in the project after curator Andrew Bolton read her book Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema and the Enigmatic Signifier, which explores how Western cinema has portrayed East Asia as a land of mystery.

Professor King also contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog, “Cinema’s Virtual Chinas.”

Filmic representations of China made in Hollywood create and disseminate fantasies about the East that have been more inspirational to designers than any actual visits to China, explains Bolton in a Business of Fashion article. Still, both Bolton and King were anxious to get outside of a critical framework of exploitation and “Orientalism” in their assessment of these hybrid cultural products. Instead they advocate a more nuanced study of this work, one that simultaneously recognizes the influence of largely inaccurate collective fantasies about China while also allowing for and admitting the pleasure of looking at these stunning costumes.

The show remains open through August 16th.

Read More:

Review of the exhibition in the Washington Post

Vogue interview between curator Andrew Bolton and designer John Galliano

 

 

Awards and Publications, Conferences and Presentations, Current Students, Uncategorized

Xiao Wang wins Student Poster Prize from American Physical Society

Xiao Wang ACS poster winner

Xiao Wang, Ph.D candidate in Physics, has been chosen as one of the two winners of the 2015 Student Poster Prize by the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Xiao’s project was titled: “Magnetic exchange interaction between Fe³+ and Ho³+ ions in hexagonal HoFeO3 thin films.”

Awards and Publications, Current Students, Outside Awards

History of Art PhD candidate Shannon Steiner awarded 2-year Kress Foundation Fellowship

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Shannon Steiner received a two-year Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Central Institute for Art History) in Munich, Germany, which will support her dissertation research on the subject of Byzantine cloisonné enamel.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation is a premier source of grant and fellowship support for the study, preservation, and conservation of European art before the 19th century. The Kress Foundation partners with six European research centers for art history and offers one pre-doctoral fellowship per year for each.

The ZIKG in Munich is an internationally recognized research center for art history founded in 1946. It houses one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive art history libraries. The ZIKG especially supports object-based research with a focus on materials and techniques, art history as a specialized science, and art history in a global context.

The Institut is also home to the Forschungsstelle Realienkunde (Material Culture Research Center), which promotes research on the intersection of materials, technology, and representation. Shannon was particularly drawn to the triangulated research approach at the ZIKG because her dissertation frames Byzantine enamel as the visual manifestation of complex materials/chemical sciences and explores how the medium could embody and communicate ideas about the Byzantine Empire’s power over the natural world.

At the ZIKG, Shannon’s research will focus first on studying surviving Byzantine texts ranging from alchemical treatises to poetry to manuals on courtly protocol for mention of enamel, in order to glean information about its cultural significance and use. She will then undertake significant object-based study, including macrophotography of surviving Byzantine enameled objects in Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and The Republic of Georgia in order to document unique characteristics of their design, material composition and fabrication. Her ultimate goal is to bring these objects’ material characteristics into dialogue with textual evidence concerning enamel’s meaning in Byzantine society and diplomacy.

Alumnae/i, Awards and Publications

Mark Sullivan (Ph.D., History of Art, 1981) publishes book on Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture

sullivan on thoreau

Mark Sullivan (Ph.D., History of Art, 1981) has published a new book, Picturing Thoreau:  Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). Mark Sullivan is associate professor of art history and director of the Art History program at Villanova University.

From the publisher’s website:

As we approach the bicentennial, in 2017, of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, there is considerable debate and confusion as to what he may, or may not have, contributed to American life and culture. Almost every American has heard of Thoreau, but only a few are aware that he was deeply engaged with most of the important issues of his day, from slavery to “Manifest Destiny” and the rights of the individual in a democratic society. Many of these issues are still affecting us today, as we move toward the second quarter of the twenty-first century. By studying how various American artists have chosen to portray Thoreau over the years since the publication of Walden in 1854, we can gain a clear understanding of how he has been interpreted (or misinterpreted) throughout the years since his death in 1862. But along the way, we might also find something useful, for our times, in the insights that Thoreau gained as he wrestled with the most urgent problems being experienced by American society in his day.

 

Alumnae/i, Awards and Publications

Noël Valis (Ph.D., 1975) publishes novella, The Labor of Longing

LaborLonging_Valis

Noël Valis (Ph.D., Spanish Literature, 1975) has published a novella, The Labor of Longing (Charlotte, NC: Main Street Rag Publishing, 2014). Noël Valis is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University.

From the publisher’s website:

“If ghosts dreamed, what would they dream? What are dreams after we are gone? Set in the late nineteenth-century New Jersey Pine Barrens, The Labor of Longing is an intensely told story of lost love and madness, lost souls and found dreams.”

The Labor of Longing was a Finalist for the Prize Americana for Prose.