HAA alum Trevor Stark (PhD 2016) has recently published his first book "Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé" (MIT Press, 2020). Stark is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Calgary and the 2020-21 Naomi Lacey Fellow at the Calgary Institute of the Humanities.

At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark offers a provocative history of this “linguistic turn...

Congratulations to HAA alumn Kevin Lotery, who will be taking up the position of Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in Europe & the Americas in the Art, Art History, and Film Department at Boston College. Kevin also recently published his first book "The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design."

Synopsis: "In 1950s London, a cadre of young artists, theorists, and popular culture aficionados known as the Independent Group (IG) came together for a series of pressing meetings. Their humble...

Dear Members of the HAA Community,

We, the Faculty and Staff of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture (HAA), affirm this truth: Black Lives Matter.

The past several weeks have been painful beyond measure, and it is difficult to put into words the sense of outrage and sadness we feel from the acts of intolerable and violent racism culminating with the recent police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, Sean Monterrosa, and the many others whose lives have...

Shawon Kinew has been named a 2020–2021 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, joining an impressive class whose work will span the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts.

As the 2020–2021 Shutzer Assistant Professor, Kinew will pursue an individual project in a community dedicated to exploration and inquiry, completing her book manuscript Baroque Softness: Melchiorre Cafà and the...

In 2019, Suzanne Preston Blier, professor of African art at Harvard University and former president of CAA, published a major book on Picasso’s use of global imagery, Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece. In addition to its scholarship the book is groundbreaking for its reliance on fair use, the principle within US copyright law that permits free reproduction of copyrighted images under certain conditions. CAA led the way among visual arts groups in calling for...

Please join us in congratulating our recent PhD graduates.

We asked our new graduates to provide a brief reflection on their time at HAA, including their research focus, fondest memories, and what their future plans are. These are reproduced in full below. For more information, please visit the HAA Instagram page.

Victoria Addona: "Victoria's research focuses on architecture's intersections with the figural arts and technical sciences in late sixteenth-century Italy. Her dissertation, "Bernardo Buontalenti and...

Throughout the Middle Ages, the religious women of Nivelles Abbey governed one of the most venerable and powerful ecclesiastical institutions in the Holy Roman Empire, which played a critical role, not only as the center of the cult of St Gertrude, but also as a lynchpin in the power politics of the empire. The recent discovery of the oldest surviving manuscript from the abbey, its Liber ordinarius, thus represents a significant addition to knowledge, not only of Nivelles' liturgy and the development of the cult of its patron saint, but also of...

David Joselit, Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies; Associate of the Department of Art Film and Visual Studies, is a Harvard alum who received both A.B. and PhD degrees in HAA. 

The full interview can be read on The Harvard Gazette website.

...

If you were unable to catch Professor Yukio Lippit's "Painting Edo" exhibition before the closure of Harvard Art Museums, you are fortunately now able to take a virtual tour.

Harvard Art Museums have released a "behind the scenes" walkthrough of the exhibit with curators Rachel Saunders and Yukio Lippit, and exhibition designer Elie Glyn....

The Dedalus Foundation is pleased to announce that Professor Suzanne Blier’s book Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke University Press) is the winner of the 2020 Robert Motherwell Book Award. The award is given annually to a book that makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of modern art and modernism...