“When I wrote for the interpretive project ‘Reconsidering Titian,’ I tried to capture the many different questions that arise for me when I look at Titian’s Rape of Europa. As an art historian and a professor, I find myself relaying facts of its commission … But these facts don’t really capture the power of this painting, an equally crucial aspect. It is one we can all see, and, perhaps for those of us brave enough, feel. Of all the poesie on display, Europa is the most violent, the most frightening,” Professor Shawon Kinew writes in “The Shimmering Quality of the Rape of Europa” on the @gardnermuseum’s Inside the Collection Blog.... Read more about Two interpretative projects at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum by Professor Shawon Kinew

Professor Joseph Koerner has recently co-authored an article in CRITICAL INQUIRY (Volume 48, Issue 1) uncovering the backstory of a famous masterpiece of Renaissance painting. It's a story about religious violence, pictorial power, medieval Jewish legal commentary, and triumphalist histories of art.

This article draws together two works...

Professor Shawon Kinew was interviewed by the Harvard Gazette on the subject of the recent Supreme Court ruling affirming that a large portion of eastern Oklahoma remains Native American Lands, specifically, the land of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation, and the name change of the NFL franchise in Washington, D.C.

 

"This is a moment to reckon with the history of American land, how it was seized, how it was tilled, and the human toll of these practices.

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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...

A first-year seminar by Assistant Professor Shawon Kinew has been the focus of a feature in the Havard Gazette.

The seminar focuses on the 19th century oil portraits of 25 Native leaders captured in an era of forced relocation. The course titled “The First Americans: Portraits of Indigenous Diplomacy and Power” asks questions relating to "the interplay of art, identity, and representation," providing the students a chance to have “a conversation with the past.”

“The takeaway is that the past still needs to be...