Message from the Chair
This newsletter can only do passing justice to all the amazing things that have happened in our department this past year! Things began to develop last spring when the administration designated us a “flagship for the humanities” at the University of Pittsburgh. As a result, Fall term started off with the news that we were to receive an extraordinarily generous endowment from the Kenneth P. Dietrich fund. This endowment enables us to provide significantly more support for our graduate students. The Dietrich endowment will help them do the kind of research and writing that will maintain and enhance our department’s outstanding reputation for the training and placement of the next generation of scholars in our field. Dietrich funding will also result in the appointment of an endowed chair, to be announced next academic year, whose role will be to attract even more top graduate students to our program.
Second, we applied for and were awarded a $1 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant in January 2015 to help us set up our “Pittsburgh Constellations Consortium.” This Consortium will institute a variety of mutually beneficial relationships between our department, other departments on campus, and arts institutions in the city. These will include a joint appointment with the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh and the hiring of an Academic Curator to steward internships, workshops, and other collaborations among the Consortium partners. The larger aim of this grant is to provide our graduate and undergraduate students with invaluable professionalizing experiences and to put Pittsburgh on the map as a leading center of innovative art historical research and curation. Our efforts are just now getting underway and we’ll be happy to share news of the Consortium as it develops.
And there is much more to report, including the bestowal of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching award on Gretchen Bender, our Assistant Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies. This is the university’s highest honor for outstanding teaching, and none of us are surprised that Gretchen was the recipient of this distinction. We also welcomed Chris Nygren to our department this year as our new specialist in Renaissance art. Chris delivered the inaugural James and Susanne Wilkinson lecture in Fall to celebrate the award of the first Wilkinson prize for outstanding scholarship in premodern Art, which went to our PhD candidate, Rachel Miller. This year, we are also very pleased to welcome Kate Joranson as our new interim head of the Frick Fine Arts Library and Molly Sabol as our new assistant department administrator.
Our faculty also continued its strong tradition of research productivity. Several books have appeared or are in press, including the Gao Minglu’s collected interviews with leading contemporary artists in China over the past thirty years titled Art Doesn’t Look at His Face, which appeared in 2014. Barbara McCloskey’s monograph, The Exile of George Grosz, came out in early 2015. Mina Rajagopalan’s Building Histories, an analysis of the changing fate and understanding of five monuments in modern Delhi, will appear in 2016, as will the book by our Mellon postdoc, Carrie Weaver, titled The Bioarchaeology of Classical Kamarina. Under the stewardship of Alison Langmead, our Director of the Visual Media Workshop, several collaborative digital humanities research projects continue to develop, including Itinera, co-directed with Drew Armstrong and Decomposing Bodies, co-directed with Josh Ellenbogen. Meanwhile, our gallery curator, Isabelle Chartier, has rounded off a terrific year with several impressive exhibitions including the much acclaimed Configuring Disciplines exhibit in Fall and the restaging of Documenta 3 in Spring as part of Terry Smith’s Museum Studies exhibition course.
We had a number of wonderful events this year, beginning with Frank Toker’s lecture delivered in Fall to honor the Friends of the Frick Fine Arts. Frank took the occasion to catch us up on the latest installment of his magisterial multi-volume publication devoted to his excavations under Florence Cathedral. In Spring, we screened a wonderful film starring John Williams, devoted to his six-volume study on the brilliantly illuminated Beatus manuscripts of the Spanish medieval era.
There is more to report, of course, and some of it appears in the following newsletter. I want to draw special attention to the outstanding achievement and continuing success of our graduate and undergraduate students. Your interest and support have gotten us where we are, and will carry us forward as we grow our graduate and undergraduate programs and develop the benefits of our Pittsburgh Constellations Consortium. We will keep you informed as things develop and we hope to see you at some of the many events we have slated for next year.
Barbara McCloskey, Chair of HAA
