Announcements

What can 16th-century India teach us about 21st-century California? Sugata Ray’s book Climate Change and the Art of Devotion explores the impacts of climate change on art, architecture, and religion in northern India during the repeated monsoon failures of the 16th through 19th centuries.

Ray arrived at Berkeley in 2012, when California’s drought was reaching crisis proportions. He began to wonder how our perceptions of water and land change during times of environmental upheaval.

Congratulations to the members of the Class of 2023 who participated in our Commencement ceremony!

I am delighted to share that my student, Hana Kozuka, has been selected as a winner for the Charlene Conrad Liebeau Research Prize. Hana was a student in my R1B from last semester, "Bodily Possession: The Collection Impulse and the Origins of Modern Medical Museums in the Western World," which explored the long history of medicalized bodies and the often painful legacies of display and spectacle that inhere in many of our institutions.

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Painting the Inhabited Landscape, Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (2023). From the Penn State University Press 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, that is, 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.

When Alice Xie moved from China to California as a teenager, she experienced major culture shock. She understood the words people spoke, but conversations were still hard to follow. She often felt isolated and underestimated.

Through art, Xie found a way to explore and communicate about this period in her life. So it was no surprise when she came to UC Berkeley and became an art history major. What caught her off-guard was that her other major – statistics – helped her understand herself, too.

The department is pleased to announce the publication of Darcy’s new book, Creole. Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century (2022). 

From Penn State University Press: 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.

It’s time to register for Summer Session classes.

The Department is pleased to announce the publication of Lisa’s new book, Etruria and Anatolia: Material Connections and Artistic Exchange by Cambridge Press. The book is co-edited with Elizabeth P. Baughan, University of Richmond, Virginia.

Thank you for supporting History of Art—our teaching, learning, research, administration—our entire community.