Cécile Whiting

Cécile is travelling for most of the coming year after receiving a bevy of awards and honors including:

• The 2018 Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History. Cécile’s accomplishments will be feted at at The Archives of American Art’s gala on October 23, 2018, in New York City. The Archives Board of Trustees and Kate Haw, Director of the Archives of American Art/ Smithsonian Institution notes 'Professor Whiting's influence on the field of American art history has been great, through her wide-ranging work from Warhol to Pop to the effect of World War II on American landscape painting.’
• A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support completion of her book, “Global War and the New American Landscape, 1939–48” in which she explores landscape artists’ experiences and depictions of World War II, from bucolic and patriotic state-sponsored renditions to grim depictions of the reality of war. Cécile is “thrilled to receive an NEH grant in support of my research, enabling me to complete archival and photographic research in Washington D.C. at the Archives of American Art, the National Archives, and Library of Congress as well as to view paintings collected in the U.S. Army Center of Military History.”
• A fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where Cécile was in residence as Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at CASVA this past summer.  “Being in residence at CASVA will enable me to be part of a wonderful community of scholars and to exchange ideas with faculty, graduate students, and curators,” Whiting said. The Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship supports faculty research in the history, theory, and criticism of the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, prints and drawings, film, photography, decorative arts, industrial design, and other arts) of any geographical area and of any period.

Bert Winther Tamaki

Bert returned to us in early 2018 following a year-long residency as Visiting Research Scholar at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan and took over as Department of Art History chair this past summer. He's had a busy year in addition to his teaching and campus leadership duties, including speaking engagements at universities and colleges including Duke, Smith, and Amherst, and conference and symposia presentations in D.C., Lake Arrowhead, and the U.K.

His current research project is entitled “Returning to Earth: Tsuchi in Postwar Japanese Ceramics, Photography, and Earth Art.”

Roland Betancourt

Roland was just awarded the title of "Chancellor's Fellow"! He returns to us following his year as 2016-2017 Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Roland’s scholarship is focused on marginalized medieval historical characters, broadening not only the historical record but also one’s conception of how difference has been exercised, assigned and received over time. 

He is the author of a forthcoming book, “Byzantine Intersectionality”, on the intersectionality of race, sexuality, and gender identity in the medieval world. These histories include eunuchs—figures assigned male at birth, who were castrated and lived their life as a third gender (neither identifying as male nor female), transgender monks, an empress ridiculed for her sexuality in a manner we would call “slut shaming” today, and differently-abled persons, among others.

Bridget R. Cooks

Bridget  “Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California” at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and led the first FOAH tour of the 2018-19 year on Saturday, October 6th for a tour of the exhibit. She will be curating an exhibit for IMCA with the assistance of a FOAH intern W19.

Bridget’s “terrific book” entitled "Exhibiting Blackness" was referenced in KPCC’s “Take Two” Wednesday, February 28th, 2018 about the passion of two Orange County art collectors for collecting the works of, and supporting, artists of color developed over the years.

Edward Dimendberg

Ed won a J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar Fellowship to support research on his next book, “The Los Angeles Project: Architectural and Urban Theories of the City of Exception.”  He will teach the Winter 2019 Getty Consortium Seminar for graduate students in Southern California entitled "Monumentality and Its Discontents."  Utilizing materials in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, the seminar will explore monumental artistic, architectural, and urban forms across history.

Margie Miles

Margie spent the past summer in Greece. She viewed fifth century B.C. Doric capitals up close and was permitted to take photos and measurements for an article on the Hephaisteion by way of a hydraulic lift.  Margie is “re-studying this Temple of Hephaistos and Athena” and writes that she’s “discovered an earlier phase, before the Persian invasion.  The temple was damaged in the earthquake of 426 B.C., mentioned by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War. Earthquakes in Athens are not as common as in the rest of Greece, so this had been overlooked, but it helps explain the chronology of the building, with the whole temple was nearly finished 465-460 B.C., except for some final touches on the sculpture.  Margie also theorizes that instead of having hypothetical interior colonnade as previously thought, the temple had wall murals, just at the time the famous Polygnotos was working in Athens and Delphi, however Margie cannot claim that he painted them with current lack of evidence.