Greetings from Ithaca in our first electronic newsletter!
The Department of History of Art and Visual Studies is flourishing, and we want to share with you some of our news, our exciting activities, and our wonderful students.
We continue to offer classes on a wide range of topics at different levels and in a variety of formats, covering artworks and visual material throughout the world, from ancient to contemporary times. In addition, we offer a number of cross-cultural and comparative classes transcending traditional subdivisions of the discipline. In future Newsletters we will highlight one of our classes in each issue.
For this year’s bi-annual Career Symposium, on September 21, we had four undergraduate alumni, Ellen Cohen, Emily Spratt, Courtney Beglin, and Maxwell Murphy, present their very varied careers and the unexpected paths they took to reach them. This event has been a great success each time we have offered it and we thank all those who have participated in the past. Judith Bernstock, now retired, initiated the symposium while serving as Director of Undergraduate Studies, and in recent years Annetta Alexandridis has enthusiastically continued the tradition. In this age of pre-professional emphasis in college education, it is important to show our students that it is not necessary to sacrifice their love of studying art for a future career in an entirely different profession, and that there are many ways that art can feature in a career, in addition to our considerable success in sending off our students to graduate programs and academic positions.
We cherish all our students, undergraduates from all over the university, majors, minors, and graduate students. Each gives us some special gift—the engineering student who develops a passion for computational art history and is now working in the Johnson’s print room, the majors who as freshmen and sophomores were by far the best in the class, but also the ones who struggled to figure out how to write about a work of art and gradually built up basic skills. We have a different kind of bond with our graduate students with whom we share a passion for scholarship. We love all of you!
Since I just finished my second stint as Director of Graduate Studies, I also know well the accomplishments of our graduate students. A number have finished their degrees in the past couple of years and those along the way have won an extraordinary number of prestigious outside fellowships. Participation in the archaeological excavations in Sardis, Turkey (jointly sponsored by Harvard and Cornell) is among the many activities of our graduate students beyond the classroom and the Ithaca campus.
In addition to making up new courses, reinventing old ones, and advising students, our faculty continue to be enormously productive with scholarly publications. This past year we were very proud to have two of our Assistant Professors, Benjamin Anderson and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, and to see their newly published books. Ben received the great honor of winning the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association for his book, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art. I will not enumerate all the books, articles, exhibition catalogues, conference presentations, and much else of our faculty in just the last year, but be assured that Cornell art history is widely represented in all aspects of our discipline.
Last, but really first in importance, is our hard-working staff: Vladimir Micic, department manager, new with us last academic year (2017-18) and Sarah Blitz, our Undergraduate/Graduate Coordinator from the start of 2018. If you have contacted our department in the last year and a half, you will have experienced their warmth and graciousness. We are very fortunate to have such able and welcoming individuals working with us.
Keep in touch!
