Tag: faculty publications
Townsend Berkeley Books Chat with Margaretta Lovell
Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America
with Margaretta Lovell
Wednesday, Oct 4, 2023 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
For more information, see the Townsend website
The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one.
The work of the New England artist Fitz H. Lane, however, was decidedly different. In Painting the Inhabited Landscape (Penn State, 2023), Margaretta Lovell (History of Art) singles out the modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about their land, their economy, their history, and their links with widely disparate global communities.
Lane’s works depict nature as productive and allied in partnership with humans to create a sustainable, balanced political economy. What emerges from this close look at Lane’s New England is a picture not of a “virgin wilderness” but of a land deeply resonant with its former uses — and a human history that incorporates, rather than excludes, Native Americans as shapers of land and as agents in that history.
Calling attention to unexplored dimensions of nineteenth-century painting, Painting the Inhabited Landscape is a major intervention in the scholarship on American art of the period, examining how that body of work commented on American culture and informs our understanding of canon formation.
Lovell is joined by David Henkin (History). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.
Passing of Professor Emerita Joanna G. Williams
From the History of Art department obituary written by Sugata Ray, Associate Professor in History of Art:
“Professor Emerita Joanna G. Williams, distinguished scholar of South and Southeast Asian art, passed away at her home in Berkeley on June 16, 2022, at the age of eighty-four. She was one of the foremost scholars of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture and, indeed, one of the most well-regarded for her seminal work on fourth- and fifth-century sculpture and architecture as well as later folk traditions.”
See the full obituary on the department website.
In honor of her life and work in the field of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture, we share here some of her publications in the field, and her image collections from her travels shared via the Artstor Public Collections.
ISBN : 0-520-32182-0
Kingdom of the sun: Indian court and village art from the Princely State of Mewar
ISBN : 0939117398
ISBN : 9780939117390
New book by Daylet Domínguez in the Spanish & Portuguese Department
Daylet Domínguez is an Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American literatures and cultures in UC Berkeley’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Her new book, Ficciones etnográficas: literatura ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2021), deals with the importance of literature for the constitution of the social sciences as a modern practice and discourse in the Hispanic Caribbean. She proposes that anthropology and its related subjects began to build a place of enunciation at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, in close relationship with travel literature, the “cuadro de costumbres,” and the novel. It is at the intersection with these literary genres that the emerging disciplines shaped a large part of their tropology and discursive genealogy; although, once institutionalized, they disavowed its epistemological validity. In the process of textual and institutional differentiation, the social sciences became one of the most effective ways to consolidate national projects, organize the transition to modern citizenships and undermine the postulates of racial and climatic degeneration associated with the region.
[translated from publisher’s site]
Ficciones etnográficas: literatura ciencias sociales y proyectos nacionales en el Caribe hispano del siglo XIX. Madrid : Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert,, 2021.
New book by Mairi McLaughlin in the French Department
La presse française historique: histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021.
Mairi McLaughlin is Associate Professor of French and an Affiliated Member of the Linguistics Department and the Department of Italian Studies. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and Translation Studies. Her most recent publication presents the results of the first major study into the history of language in the French press. It has a dual aim: to shed light on the history of the genre of journalism and to explore what the study of historical periodicals can bring to our understanding of the history of language.
Professor McLaughlin discussed her recent book with David Bates (Rhetoric) on November 10, 2021 through the Townsend Center’s Berkeley Book Chats.
Histórias das mulheres, histórias feministas.
Check out this new catalogue with curation by UC Berkeley Art History faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson.
From Oskicat:
“The book brings together the catalogs of two exhibitions organized in a complementary, parallel and articulated way in MASP: “Histórias das mulheres: artistas até 1900” (Stories of women: artists until 1900), curated by Julia Bryan -Wilson, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and Mariana Leme, and “Histórias feministas: artistas depois de 2000″ (Feminist Stories: artists after 2000), curated by Isabella Rjeille. The juxtaposition of two shows with distinct scopes in a single publication allows us to establish dialogues between productions of distant times, and to understand how the unfolding of these productions from one temporal arc to another occurs. In recent years, MASP has been undertaking a pioneering effort to include women’s works both in its collection and in its programming, a path also trodden by other institutions around the world. The museum’s program during 2019 is dedicated to women artists, and this publication, alongside the anthology of accompanying texts, is the culmination of this effort.”
New Book and a Conversation with Suzanne Guerlac from the French Department
Check out this new book by Department of French faculty member Suzanne Guerlac, available in print and as an ebook through the online catalog.
Through an engagement with the philosophies of Marcel Proust’s contemporaries Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, author Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Proust’s magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu).
On Wednesday, March 10 from 12-1, Professor Guerlac will be a special guest on Berkeley Book Chats hosted online by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
New publication by Nick Paige from the French Department
Check out this new book by Department of French faculty member Nicholas Paige, available in print and as an ebook through the online catalog.
From introduction:
“This book is about the evolution of French and to a lesser degree English novels – by which I mean French- and English-language novels – from 1601 to 1830. And while evolution is very much at the center of my preoccupations, I do not offer a “story” about that evolution. There is no plot, as we might want if we thought of the novel moving forward, perhaps from birth, episode by episode, toward a resolution, some happy state of stability – as if, in other words, the novel’s own history could be made into a kind of novel.”
“In lieu of a story, Technologies of the Novel offers a quantitative account of the ceaseless yet patterned flux of the novel system over these twenty-three decades.”
“Technologies of the Novel is, then, digital and distant; but it is most certainly not antianalogue or anticlose.”
New Publication by Art History Faculty Imogen Hart, Editor.
Check out this new publication edited by Art History Faculty member Imogen Hart, available as an e-resource through the online catalog.
From Bloomsbury:
“By foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative, this volume of essays offers a model for a more integrated form of art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British ceramics, it brings to centre stage makers, objects, concepts and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse. These essays challenge the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.”
New Publication by Art History Faculty Anneka Lenssen
Check out the new publication by Anneka Lenssen, UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Global Modern Art, with UC Berkeley’s Oski Express.
From University of California Press:
“In modern Syria, a contested territory at the intersection of differing regimes of political representation, artists ventured to develop strikingly new kinds of painting to link their images to life forces and agitated energies. Examining the works of artists Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres, Beautiful Agitation explores how painters in Syria activated the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world. Drawing on archival materials in Syria and beyond, Anneka Lenssen reveals new trajectories of painterly practice in a twentieth century defined by shifting media technologies, moving populations, and the imposition of violently enforced nation-state borders. The result is a study of Arab modernism that foregrounds rather than occludes efforts to agitate against imposed identities and intersubjective relations.”
On Display: Recent Publications by Art Practice and History of Art Faculty
Now on display on the Art History/Classics Library new books shelf:
Fifteen new publications written by, edited by, or featuring contributions by faculty members from Art Practice, History of Art, and Librarian Emerita, Kathryn M. Wayne.
Featured:
Picture Industry : a Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844-2018, chapter by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Eco-art History in East and Southeast Asia, chapter by Gregory P. Levine
How Art Can Be Thought : a Handbook for Change, by Allan deSouza
Seehearing the Enlightened Failure / Cecilia Vicuña, featuring essay by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion : Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850, by Sugata Ray
Picasso 1932 : Love, Fame, Tragedy : the EY Exhibition, with contributions by T.J. Clark
Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh, by Anne Walsh, with contributions by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Sharon Hayes, co-authored by Julia Bryan-Wilson
Sir, by Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Mario García Torres: Illusion Brought Me Here, co-authored by Julia Bryan-Wilson
A Material World : Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, co-edited by Margaretta Markle Lovell
Heaven on Earth : Painting and the Life to Come, by T.J. Clark
Water Histories of South Asia : the Materiality of Liquescence, co-edited by Sugata Ray
Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature, by Elizabeth Alice Honig
An Analysis of the Saltillo Style in Mexican Sarapes, by Katharine Drew Jenkins; edited by Kathryn M. Wayne; essay by Ira Jacknis