Release Date: August 30, 2010

National Gallery of Art Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Announces 2010–2011 Appointments

Washington, DC—The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2010–2011. They include Joseph J. Rishel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Carmen C. Bambach, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; and Victor I. Stoichita, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor for spring 2011. Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge has been named the 60th A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2011.

CASVA also announced the appointment of seven senior and four visiting senior fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, 18 predoctoral fellows, and three predoctoral fellowships for historians of American art to travel abroad.

CASVA was founded in 1979 to promote the study of the history, theory, and criticism of art, architecture, and urbanism through the formation of a community of scholars. A variety of private sources supports the program of fellowships, and the appointments are ratified by the Gallery's Board of Trustees.

The position of Samuel H. Kress Professor was created in 1965. It is reserved for a distinguished art historian who, as the senior member of CASVA, pursues scholarly work and counsels predoctoral fellows in residence.

Joseph J. Rishel, the Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture and curator of the Rodin Museum, has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1972. He received a BA from Hobart College and earned his MA at the University of Chicago. He has served as the chairman of the Barnes Foundation College Assessment Advisory Committee and has been a member of the American Federation of Arts Exhibitions Committee since 2000. Rishel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was made an officier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010 and has been an editor, author, and contributor to many exhibition catalogues specializing in 18th- and 19th-century art.

The position of Andrew W. Mellon Professor was created in 1994 for distinguished academic and museum professionals. Mellon professors serve two consecutive years and pursue independent research at CASVA.

Carmen C. Bambach is curator of the department of drawings and prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received a PhD from Yale University, where she also earned her BA and MA degrees. Dr. Bambach was a John Simon Guggenheim fellow in 1996–1997 and the Craig Hugh Smyth Visiting Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in 2009. She is also the author of Una eredità difficile: I disegni ed i manoscritti di Leonardo tra mito e documento (1999) and Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (1999). Bambach's work has been published in The Burlington Magazine, Apollo, and an important series of exhibition catalogues on Italian Renaissance drawings.

The position of Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor was established in 2002 through a grant from the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation. The Safra Professor serves for up to six months, forging connections between the research of the curatorial staff and that of visiting scholars at CASVA. At the same time, the Safra Professor advances his or her own research on subjects associated with the Gallery's permanent collection. The Safra Professor may also organize colloquia for predoctoral fellows and for emerging scholars and curators. The Safra Professor's area of expertise varies from year to year, spanning the Gallery's permanent collection—from sculpture, to painting, to works on paper of all periods.

Victor I. Stoichita is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Université de Fribourg in Switzerland. He earned a Doctorat d'état from the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and his PhD from the University of Rome. He was the Rudolf Wittkower Visiting Professor at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut, in Rome in 2005 and received a fellowship from the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2002. Stoichita is the author of The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (2008), Goya: The Last Carnival (with Anna Maria Coderch, 1999), A Short History of the Shadow (1997), Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (1995), and L'instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l'aube des temps modernes (1993), all of which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, among other languages.

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in 1949 "to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts." The program is named for Andrew W. Mellon, the founder of the National Gallery of Art, who gave the nation his art collection and funds to build the West Building, which opened to the public in 1941.

Mary Beard is a professor at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in 1982 and where she served as the chair of the Faculty Board of Classics from 2005 to 2006. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Society of Antiquaries. Beard is the author of The Fires of Vesuvius (2008), The Roman Triumph (2007), The Colosseum (2004), and The Parthenon (2002); she is also the co-author of Classical Art: From Greece to Rome (2001), Religions of Rome I and II (1998), Classics: A Very Short Introduction (1995), and Rome in the Late Republic (1985).

CASVA Members for 2010–2011

Members of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) for the 2010–2011 academic year are listed below with their current affiliations and research topics.

Paul Mellon Senior Fellow

Elizabeth Sears
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Warburg Circles: Toward a Cultural-Historical History of Art, 1929–1964

Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellows

Daniela Bohde
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Disarray on Calvary: Passion Scenes in Early Sixteenth-Century German Art

Cammy Brothers (spring 2011)
University of Virginia
Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome

Laura Weigert (spring 2011)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Images in Action: The Theatricality of Franco-Flemish Art in the Late Middle Ages

Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellows

Sarah Betzer
University of Virginia
Surface and Depth: Antiquity and the Body after Archaeology

Rachel Kousser (fall 2010)
Brooklyn College
Ancient Iconoclasm: Destroying the Power of Images in Greece, 480–31 BC

John-Paul Stonard
London
Against Henry Moore

Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellows, Fall 2010

Heather McPherson
University of Alabama at Birmingham
The Artist's Studio and the Image of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France

Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi
Università di Pisa
The Emblematic Garden

Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellows, Fall 2010

Fredrika H. Jacobs
Virginia Commonwealth University (emerita)
Dialogues of Devotion: Votive Panel Paintings in Renaissance Italy, c. 1450–1610

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan Limited, Landscape Design
The London Square, 1580 to the Present

Postdoctoral Fellows

Megan E. O'Neil
A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2009–2011
University of Southern California
The Lives of Ancient Maya Sculptures

Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2010–2012
Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-Fashioning at the End of the Republic

Predoctoral Fellows (in residence)

Priyanka Basu
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2009–2011
[University of Southern California]
Kunstwissenschaft and the "Primitive": Excursions in the History of Art History, 1880–1925

Shira Brisman
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2009–2011
[Yale University]
The Handwritten Letter and the Work of Art in the Age of the Printing Press, 1490–1530

Christina Ferando
David E. Finley Fellow, 2008–2011
[Columbia University]
Staging Canova: Sculpture, Connoisseurship, and Display, 1780–1822

Dipti Khera
Ittleson Fellow, 2009–2011
[Columbia University]
Picturing India's "Land of Princes" between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and Its Environs

Beatrice Kitzinger
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2008–2011
[Harvard University]
Crucifix and Crucifixion in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Breton Gospel Books: The Early Medieval Liturgical Cross and Its Representations

Jason David LaFountain
Wyeth Fellow, 2009–2011
[Harvard University]
The Puritan Art World

Lisa Lee
Twenty-four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2009–2011
[Princeton University]
Sculpture's Condition/Conditions of Publicness: Isa Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn

Predoctoral Fellows (not in residence)

Benjamin Anderson
David E. Finley Fellow, 2009–2012
[Bryn Mawr College]
World Image after World Empire: The Ptolemaic Cosmos in the Early Middle Ages

Dana E. Byrd
Wyeth Fellow, 2010–2012
[Yale University]
Reconstructions: The Visual and Material Cultures of the Plantation, 1861–1877

Jason Di Resta
Samuel H. Kress Fellow, 2010–2012
[The Johns Hopkins University]
"Crudeliter accentuando eructant": Rethinking Center and Periphery in the Art of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone

Razan Francis
Twenty-four-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2010–2012
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]
Secrets of the Arts: Enlightenment Spain's Contested Islamic Craft Heritage

Meredith Gamer
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2010–2013
[Yale University]
Criminal and Martyr: Art and Religion in Britain's Early Modern Eighteenth Century

Nathaniel B. Jones
David E. Finley Fellow, 2010–2013
[Yale University]
Nobilibus pinacothecae sunt faciundae: The Inception of the Fictive Picture Gallery in Augustan Rome

Di Yin Lu
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, 2010–2012
[Harvard University]
Reassigning Civilization: Cultural Property Law Enforcement in Shanghai, 1949–1978

Kate Nesin
Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellow, 2010–2011
[Princeton University]
Twombly's Things: The Sculptures of Cy Twombly

Anna Lise Seastrand
Ittleson Fellow, 2010-2012
[Columbia University]
Praise, Politics, and Language: South Indian Mural Paintings, 1500–1800

Jennifer M. S. Stager
Paul Mellon Fellow, 2009–2012
[University of California–Berkeley]
The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art

Miya Tokumitsu
Robert H. and Clarice Smith Fellow, 2010–2011
[University of Pennsylvania]
"Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine": The Sculpture of Leonhard Kern (1588–1662)

Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowships for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad

Sarah Beetham
[University of Delaware]

Nika Elder
[Princeton University]

Christina Rosenberger
[New York University]

For more information about CASVA programs and fellowships, please call (202) 842-6482 or visit the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov/casva.