Congratulations to Anneka Lenssen for learning that her book Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press, 2020) has been shortlisted for a Modernist Studies Association Book Prize, given annually to "the book that made the most significant contribution to modernist studies." 

Anneka Lenssen has published Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics (UC Press). Based on more than a decade of research, in Syria (until 2011) and elsewhere, the book traces the interplay of vitalist painting theories and the making of Syria as a contested territory between 1900 and 1965. It examines works by such artists as Kahlil Gibran, Adham Ismail, and Fateh al-Moudarres to show how Syrians used the mutability of form to rethink relationships of figure to ground, outward appearance to inner presence, and self to world.

An essay by assistant Professor Anneka Lenssen has been awarded the 2019 Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation's Prize for a Critical Essay on Contemporary Art. Lenssen's prize-winning essay, "Abstraction of the Many? Finding Plenitude in Arab Painting," will be published in the catalogue to the upcoming exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, opening at NYU's Grey Art Gallery in January 2020. Lenssen was nominated by Nada Shabout. The Foundation's announcement is here.

The Department is pleased to welcome new graduate students Thadeus Dowad and Kristen Kido; Kathryn Stine, a new member of the department's Visual Resources Center staff; and Anneka Lenssen We are looking forward to a great year! 

The Department is pleased to welcome Anneka Lenssen as our latest new Assistant Professor, in this case of Global Modern Art. Anneka earned her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program (working with Professor Caroline Jones) and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (working with Professor Nasser Rabat). Even before finishing her PhD, she was hired by the American University in Cairo, where she has been directing their new Visual Cultures Program this academic year. Not surprisingly, Anneka’s time in Cairo (and before that in Lebanon and Syria) has given her unprecedented access to her research materials and an up-front seat at major social transformations: Anneka specializes in modern painting, contemporary visual practices, and cultural politics in the Middle East since the Second World War. Her research examines problems of artistic representation in relation to the globalizing imaginaries of empire, nationalism, communism, decolonization, non-alignment, and Third World humanism. Arising from her MIT doctoral dissertation, her current book project is a study of avant-garde painting and the making of Syria as a c... [show more]