Faculty for Undergraduate Art History Studies at Sarah Lawrence College

Art History Faculty

David Castriota

Courses: Christianity and the Roman Empire, Christianity and the Roman Empire, Ancient Albion–Art and Culture in the British Isles from Stonehenge to the Viking Invasions

Faculty Web site

B.A., New York University. M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. Special interests in Greek art of the classical and Hellenistic periods, Roman art of the late republic and early empire, and the art of prehistoric Europe; author of Myth, Ethos, and Actuality: Official Art in Fifth-Century B.C. Athens, The Ara Pacis Augustae and the Imagery of Abundance in Later Greek and Early Roman Imperial Art, and a critical commentary on Alois Riegl’s Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament; editor of Artistic Strategy and the Rhetoric of Power: Political Uses of Art from Antiquity to the Present; recipient of fellowships from the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Early Christian and Byzantine Art and the Society of Fellows of Columbia University and of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. SLC, 1992-

Ruben Cordova

Courses: Early Modern Art, Mexico: Art and Culture

B.A., Brown University. Ph.D., UC Berkeley. Special interests include Mexican and Chicano art, popular traditions such as Day of the Dead in Mexico and the U.S., Primitivism in 20th Century Art, and Cubism. Has curated or co-curated 16 exhibitions treating Latin American, Mexican, Latino, and U.S. art. Articles published in Artlies and Aztlán, entries in Encyclopedia Latina, catalogue essays on Latin American and Chicano art. Forthcoming work includes The Con Safo Art Group and the Politics of South Texas. Grants include NEH. SLC, 2007-

Eva Diaz

Courses: Critical Models in Art and Theory, 1965 to the Present

B.A., University of California. M.A., Princeton University. PhD, Princeton. Eva Diaz is a New York-based art historian and critic. Throughout 2006-2007 she served as the Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In the fall of 2007 she received her Ph.D. at Princeton University for her disseration titled “Chance and Design: Experimentation at Black Mountain College.” She has presented invited lectures at ARCO in Madrid, the Arnolfini in Bristol, England, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, among other venues. Her critical writing has appeared in Art in America, Modern Painters, Time Out New York, and numerous exhibition catalogues, and appears in the recent book Curating Subjects edited by Paul O’Neill. She recently co-organized the exhibition and accompanying catalog Mind the Gap at Smack Mellon Gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn about artists’ interventions in the city. Throughout 2006-2007 she guest curated a series of exhibitions about experiment, art, and performance at Black Mountain College at the Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina. She has been awarded the Jacob K. Javits, Andrew W. Mellon, and College Art Association Professional Development Fellowships, among others. Since 1999 she has served on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. SLC, 2008-

Lee MacCormick Edwards

Courses: Revolution to Romanticism: Art in the Era of Napoleon

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College. M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University. Special interest in the art and social history of the nineteenth century; author of Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Painting, 1840-1910 and Herkomer: A Victorian Artist; articles published in The Burlington Magazine, Arts Magazine, The Art Book, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Studies Bulletin, and The American Art Journal; author of numerous catalogue essays and contributor to The New Dictionary of National Biography, The Dictionary of Art, and Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia.Henry-Russell Hitchcock Best Book Award; Visiting Mellon Fellow, Yale Center for British Art. SLC, 2000-

Joseph C. Forte

Courses: World Architecture and Urban Design: 1945-Present: Postwar, Postmodern, Post-Theory, The Art and Architecture of the Italian Renaissance

Faculty Web site

B.A., Brooklyn College. M.A., M.Phil, Ph.D., Columbia University. Special interest in art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance and the seventeenth century, the history of architecture, and art and architectural theory; author of articles on Italian sixteenth-century drawings, French painting of the seventeenth century, and American nineteenth-century architecture. SLC, 1978-

Michelle Gilbert

Courses: African Art: Images of Transformation

B.A., University of California-Los Angeles. M.A., Northwestern University. M.A., New York University. Ph.D., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Special interest in African art and architecture; religion, political power, and divine kingship in Ghana; author of Hollywood Icons, Local Demons: Popular Art in Ghanaand articles on royal art, popular theatre, religious pluralism, and chieftaincy in Akuapem, Ghana. Fellowships from NEH, Mellon, SSRC, CSWR Harvard Divinity School, and Overseas Ministries Study Center for Mission History. SLC, 2004-

Judith Rodenbeck

Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History

Courses: First-Year Studies: Thinking Art/Works

Faculty Web site

B.A., Yale University. B.F.A., Massachusetts College of Art. Ph.D., Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945; in intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts; and in intermedia. Currently serving as editor-in-chief of the Art Journal.SLC, 2000-