Tag: “new faculty publications”
New book by Jeroen Dewulf
Nova História do Cristianismo Negro na África Ocidental e nas Américas makes a historiographical intervention aimed at the history of black Catholicism and black religion in the Americas in a broader way. Dewulf’s central and well-documented assertion is that black Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, has roots in pre-Tridentine Portuguese Catholicism. Even before the advent of the slave trade, Catholicism had become an indigenous African religion, at times assuming pre-Tridentine and syncretic forms that have become irreconcilable for the Europeans of the post-Tridentine period. This argument has significant historiographical consequences; the long-standing confusion about the religiosity of the enslaved people is, at least in part, the result of assumptions that Africans knew little about Christianity before their enslavement. On the contrary, Dewulf traces these religious forms to the slave ships that transported human “cargo” to the Americas. This book is a timely salute to the Catholic and Christian studies that has for a long time portrayed Christians of African descent as marginalized and atypical people, rather than important global actors. (Citation of the Committee of the Prize John Gilmary Shea of the year 2023)
[from publisher’s site]
Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the UC Berkeley Department of German and a Professor at Berkeley’s Folklore Program and an affiliated member of the Center for African Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. He recently completed his long-term role as director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies where he is chair of the Center for Portuguese Studies. His main area of research is Dutch and Portuguese colonial history, with a focus on the transatlantic slave trade and the culture and religion of African-descended people in the American diaspora. He also publishes in the field of Folklore Studies and about other aspects of Dutch, German, and Portuguese literature, culture, and history.
Nova História do Cristianismo Negro na África Ocidental e nas Américas. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2024.
New Publication from Faculty Lisa Pieraccini
Art History Faculty Lisa Pieraccini has a new publication out titled Consumption, Ritual, Art and Society: Interpretive Approaches and Recent Discoveries of Food and Drink in Etruria (2023)
It will soon be available from UC Berkeley Library for loan.
From the Publisher:
Food determines who we are. We are what we eat, but also how we eat, with whom we eat, where we eat and, in some cases, even why we eat. Food production and consumption in the ancient world can express multiple dimensions of identity and negotiate belonging to, or exclusion from, cultural groups. It can bind through religious praxis, express wealth, manifest cultural identity, reveal differentiation in age or gender, and define status. As a prism through which to investigate the past, its utility is manifold. The chapters gathered together in this ground-breaking book explore the intersections between food, consumption, and ritual within Etruscan society through a purposeful cross-disciplinary approach. It offers a unique and innovative selection of up-to-date analysis from a variety of Etruscan food-related topics. From banqueting, feasting, fish rites, and symbolic consumption to bio-archaeological data, this volume explores a new and exciting field in ancient Italian archaeology.
New Publication from Faculty Julia Bryan-Wilson
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, has a new book out, available at the UC Berkeley Library.
From the publishers website:
The most comprehensive book on the work of Liza Lou, whose popular and critically acclaimed installations made entirely of beads consider the important themes of women, community, and the valorization of labor.
Liza Lou first gained attention in 1996 when her room-sized sculpture Kitchen was shown at the New Museum in New York. Representing five years of individual labor, this groundbreaking work subverted standards of art by introducing glass beads as a fine art material. The project blurred the rigid boundary between fine art and craft, and established Lou’s long-standing exploration of materiality, process, and beauty. Working within a craft métier has led the artist to work in a variety of socially engaged settings, from community groups in Los Angeles, to a collective she founded in Durban, South Africa. Over the past fifteen years, Lou has focused on a poetic approach to abstraction as a way to highlight the process underlying her work.
In this comprehensive volume that considers the entirety of Lou’s singular vision, curators, art historians, and artists offer important perspectives on the breadth of the work.
New Publication by Faculty Lisa Pieraccini
Lisa Pieraccini, Lecturer of First Millennium BCE Italy, Reception, Collecting, has published a new book, available from the UC Berkeley Library. It is also available as an e-book.
From the publisher’s website:
Striking similarities in Etruscan and Anatolian material culture reveal various forms of contact and exchange between these regions on opposite sides of the Mediterranean. This is the first comprehensive investigation of these connections, approaching both cultures as agents of artistic exchange rather than as side characters in a Greek-focused narrative. It synthesizes a wide range of material evidence from c. 800 – 300 BCE, from tomb architecture and furniture to painted vases, terracotta reliefs, and magic amulets. By identifying shared practices, common visual language, and movements of objects and artisans (from both east to west and west to east), it illuminates many varied threads of the interconnected ancient Mediterranean fabric. Rather than trying to account for the similarities with any one, overarching theory, this volume presents multiple, simultaneous modes and implications of connectivity while also recognizing the distinct local identities expressed through shared artistic and cultural traditions.
New Publication by Faculty Margaretta Lovell
Margaretta Lovell, Professor of American Art and Architecture, has a new book published, available in the UC Berkeley Library. There will be a Berkeley Book Chat with Margaretta Lovell, joined by David Henkin, Wednesday, October 4th from 12:00 to 1:00pm in 220 Stephens Hall. Registration is requested for attendance.
From the publisher’s website:
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is an American art history that in its depth of research and its absolute assurance in method and goals matches or surpasses anything done by any global modernist art historian today. It is a significant contribution to the study of nineteenth-century world history in visual and material studies, and will be of interest to anyone looking at the formation of global modernism, technologies, and capital markets.”—Bruce Robertson, coauthor of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
“Painting the Inhabited Landscape is by far the most insightful study of Lane and his art to date. Margaretta Lovell’s close examination of Lane’s life, art, and the historical contexts within which he worked represents not only a quantum leap for our understanding of Lane and his world but also a new standard of scholarship for the field of American art.”—Alan Wallach, author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States
New Book by Anthony Cascardi
![Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique [cover]](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/art-of-critique.png)
Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.
[from publisher’s site]
Anthony J. Cascardi is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Consequences of Enlightenment; Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics; The Subject of Modernity; and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy.
Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2023.
New Publication By Art History Faculty Aglaya Glebova
Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin
by Associate Professor Aglaya Glebova for European Modern Art.
From Yale University Press:
“Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union
Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language.
In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenko’s photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s partner in art and life.”
New Book by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
![Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century [book cover]](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CREOLE.jpg)
This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of “Creole,” a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.
“Creole” implies that the geography of one’s birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of races in Creole society. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby reconstructs the search for visual signs of racial difference among people whose genealogies were often repressed. She explores French representations of Creole subjects and representations by Creole artists in France, the Caribbean, and the Americas. To do justice to the complexity of Creole identity, Grigsby interrogates the myriad ways in which people defined themselves in relation to others. With close attention to the differences between Afro-Creole and Euro-Creole cultures and persons, Grigsby examines figures such as Théodore Chassériau, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Alexandre Dumas père, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, the models Joseph and Laure, Josephine Bonaparte, Jeanne Duval, and Adah Isaacs Menken.
Based on extensive archival research, Creole is an original and important examination of colonial identity. This essential study will be welcomed by specialists in nineteenth-century art history, French cultural history, the history of race, and transatlantic history more generally.
[from publisher’s site]
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance; Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal; and Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France.
Creole : Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century.
University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.
New Book by Michael Iarocci
![The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya's Disasters of War [cover]](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/art-witnessing.png)
Widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the history of visual depictions of war, Francisco de Goya’s renowned print series The Disasters of War remains a touchstone for serious engagement with the violence of war and the questions raised by its artistic representation.
The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War provides a new account of Goya’s print series by taking readers through the forty-seven prints he dedicated to the violence of war. Drawing on facets of Goya’s artistry rarely considered together before, the book challenges the notion that documentary realism and historical testimony were his primary aims. Michael Iarocci argues that while the depiction of war’s atrocities was central to Goya’s project, the lasting power of the print series stems from the artist’s complex moral and aesthetic meditations on the subject.
Making novel contributions to longstanding debates about historical memory, testimony, and the representation of violence, The Art of Witnessing tells a new story, print by print, to highlight the ways in which Goya’s masterpiece extends far beyond conventional understandings of visual testimony.
[from publisher’s site]
Michael Iarocci is professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (18th-21st centuries) in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Comparative and Transatlantic Hispanic Studies. Literature and geopolitics. Aesthetics and ideology. Visual culture. His previous books include Enrique Gil y la genalogía de la lírica moderna (Juan de la Cuesta, 1999), and Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe and the Legacies of Empire (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).
The Art of Witnessing: Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023.
New Book by Henrike Christiane Lange
![Giotto's Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility [book cover]](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/giotto.jpg)
In this book, Henrike Lange takes the reader on a tour through one of the most beloved and celebrated monuments in the world – Giotto’s Arena Chapel. Paying close attention to previously overlooked details, Lange offers an entirely new reading of the stunning frescoes in their spatial configuration. The author also asks fundamental questions that define the chapel’s place in Western art history. Why did Giotto choose an ancient Roman architectural frame for his vision of Salvation? What is the role of painted reliefs in the representation of personal integrity, passion, and the human struggle between pride and humility familiar from Dante’s Divine Comedy? How can a new interpretation regarding the influence of ancient reliefs and architecture inform the famous “Assisi controversy” and cast new light on the debate around Giotto’s authorship of the Saint Francis cycle?
Illustrated with almost 200 color plates, including individual images of each scene in the narrative cycle, this volume invites scholars and students to rediscover a key monument of art and architecture history and to see it with fresh eyes.
“Henrike Lange’s book on Giotto’s Arena Chapel changes our view of this key work of painting in Italy around 1300.” – Ulrich Pfisterer, Director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte; LMU, Munich
“Dr. Lange’s discovery is so all-encompassing and so to the point… It is now possible to bridge the Anglo-Saxon and Italian views of Giotto where once they were thought to be irreconcilable: a great step forward for the field.” – Laurence B. Kanter, Chief Curator, Yale University Art Gallery
“Lange shows how the theme of triumph is at once central and inexhaustible in the Arena Chapel – its structure, imagery, physical presence, context. The book is itself a vivid triumphal procession of ways of seeing, scholarship, discovery, and critical thinking.” – Randolph Starn, UC Berkeley History
“Lange’s discovery is completely new and original: an entirely convincing case built on the foundations of history, literature, philosophy, political iconography, and theology.” – Andrew Stewart, UC Berkeley History of Art and Classics
“Lange has the rare ability to build bridges for the reader with her command of European languages that allow her to translate and integrate the vast libraries of research on Giotto written in different linguistic and scholarly traditions. The very elegance and clarity of her writing suggest that Lange’s will be a contribution of real significance and will have quite an impact on medieval and Renaissance studies.” – Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor of Italian, Yale University
“At its heart Lange’s impressive book relays an intensely visual argument. It is a scholarly triumph in itself to explicate the intimate relation – architectural, political, theological – between the Arena Chapel and a famous Roman prototype, the Arch of Titus. All scholars and students of the period will need to engage this powerful historical proposition and its implications for Italian Trecento visual culture. But Lange also finds the full measure of Giotto’s triumph as a painter.” – Whitney Davis, UC Berkeley History of Art
[from publisher’s site]
Henrike Christiane Lange is Associate Professor in History of Art and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Lange completed her Magister Artium at Universität Hamburg, Germany, before earning her PhD at Yale University. The present book is the culmination of two decades of research at sites, archives, and collections across Europe.