Unknown artist, Two Horsemen with Armies, 15th Century (detail). Tempera, ink, gold leaf, manuscript page, Naskh script, late 15th cent. Shiraz school. 果冻视频 College Museum of Art Collection 1985.006.524, gift of Nanette Rodney Kelekian.
Jenny Anger, Professor
Surrealist Women Artists and Mental Illness (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2026)
In this edited volume, Jenny Anger explores an understudied aspect of surrealism. Surrealist orthodoxy idealized feminine madness for its supposedly unfettered access to the unconscious. At the same time, an unusually large number of surrealist women artists experienced mental illness. Indeed, Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Sonja Sekula, and Unica Z眉rn, among others, all suffered from maladies ranging from depression to schizophrenia鈥攁nd all found their way into the surrealist movement. Did these women find the masculine, surrealist dream of feminized, mad genius prohibitive鈥攐r productive? Although stories differ, it was often the artists who untethered themselves from surrealism who fared the best.
Anger鈥檚 book stems in part from years of teaching 鈥淢odern Art in Europe 1900-1940鈥 and a specialized class on surrealism in 2024.
Michael 鈥淢ac鈥 Mackenzie, Professor
Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie and Remembrance (Peter Lang, 2019)
Mac Mackenzie researches a number of areas of 20th century German art history, including architecture and urban planning, and the competing cultures of East and West Germany after World War II, but especially the art of the period between the World Wars. He recently published a book on Otto Dix, a painter who fought in the trenches of the First World War, suffered from PTSD, and made powerful, disturbing, and often humorous art about his experiences.
Much of his scholarship comes out of courses he has taught that explore what it was like to live in Paris and Berlin in the 20th century.
Fredo Rivera 鈥06, Assistant Professor
鈥淚ncomplete postmodernism: The rise and fall of Utopia in Cuba,鈥 in Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture & Society under Late Socialism (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019)
Fredo Rivera is a contributing author to Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture & Society under Late Socialism, edited by Vladimir Kulic and featuring essays by fifteen authors. Rivera wrote Chapter 8, 鈥淚ncomplete postmodernism: The rise and fall of Utopia in Cuba,鈥 which explores postmodern semblances within Cuban architecture from the 1970s to the 1990s. The essay discusses the role of graphic art in the built environment, as well as new architectures of tourism that emerge prior to and during Cuba鈥檚 Special Period (1991-2000).
The essay鈥檚 focus on modernity and postmodernism is more broadly discussed and debated in Rivera鈥檚 courses on architecture.
Eiren Shea, Assistant Professor
Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 with Patricia Blessing and Elizabeth Dosp臎l Williams (Elements in The Global Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 2023)
This book introduces textiles and dress from Japan to Iberia over an 1100 year span. Written with her frequent collaborators, Patricia Blessing (Stanford University) and Elizabeth Dosp臎l Williams (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), this work showcases the collaborative work that is so important to Shea. This book connects directly with Shea鈥檚 most recent Tutorial: Start of Fashion.
Textiles of China and Central Asia (Prestel Press, 2025)
In this catalog of the Silk Road Collection, Shea contributed three sections which included essays and catalog entries on Liao dynasty embroidery (10th鈥12th centuries), 12th and 13th century kesi (silk tapestry), and gold-woven silks from the Mongol period (12th鈥13th centuries). The textiles from these sections connect to objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Mus茅e Guimet (Paris), here published for the first time. This research connects to material that Shea covers in many of her classes, including ARH 212: The Global Mongol Century and ARH 211: Arts and Visual Cultures of China.