Greg Levine with David Smith’s “Detroit Queen”. Bronze. 1957. Harvard University Art Museum

Anneka Lenssen

Greetings from the Department Chair and Vice Chair

Fall 2021 Welcome

There are as many different versions of “you can’t go home again” as there are individuals and communities. We can’t know what this means for each of us in the department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. But as we return to teaching, research, and work spaces, we are mindful of and grateful for our community and its diversity—however things may have changed and continue to change for us individually and collectively.

There is news of change in History of Art, good news to share.

We welcome in-person the undergraduate and graduate students and staff who joined the department during the pandemic, were part of our virtual community, and will now be on campus this fall first time. In different ways, we are all going to be getting to know our department.

We are seeking applications for a new tenure-track faculty position in African and/or African Diaspora and/or African American Arts and Visual Cultures. Spread the news! And stay tuned for the announcement of public lectures in November offered by candidates visiting the campus.

We are offering an exciting slate of lecture courses and seminars. Many are new and take advantage of university programs that support new and collaborative teaching. These are courses that change teaching and learning in concert with our commitment to decolonial and inclusive art histories and courses that demonstrate the vivid significance of diverse visual and material pasts to our present and future. We are moving forward with the redesign of our undergraduate major with the project, “Activating History of Art Teaching: Bringing Connect, Capstone, and other Student Research Experiences into the Classroom,” supported by the Center for Teaching and Learning.

After pausing admission to our Graduate Program last year, we are energetically reactivating admissions. Our support for inclusion and belonging continues, and we look forward to applications that reflect diverse fields, methods, and perspectives in art history and related fields. Don’t hesitate to contact our Graduate Student Advisor for information about admissions.

Our graduate students, faculty, and lecturers continue their lively object, archive, site, and theoretical research and community-based and global collaborations (if still partly online) with some return to fieldwork. A year and more of determination is bearing fruit; dissertations are being completed and publications are coming out.

This year’s Lecture Series will be organized again by a group of our graduate students working with our lecturers and Assistant Professors. It will include our reactivated department annual Marcy C. Stoddard Lecture in the History of Art, to be offered in the spring by Professor Persis Berlekamp (University of Chicago), a scholar of Islamic art and architecture.

Our V-Lab (Visualization Lab for Digital Art History) is gearing up to return to its array of activities, including its wildly popular workshops in digital photography, 360-degree capture techniques, Reflective Transformation Imaging (RTI), and additional areas in data visualization and digital image management.

There’s much more to celebrate and look forward to. For additional and emerging news about the department, individual awards, publications, and achivements, keep an eye on our website: https://arthistory.berkeley.edu/about/news/

Greg Levine, Chair

Anneka Lenssen, Vice Chair