To our students, colleagues and alumni, greetings!

The last year has been a busy one, our third in residence in our stunning new building which we share with the Kemper Art Museum. With our neighboring Schools of Art and Architecture, we share a fine library, a world-class museum, and superb facilities that were dedicated in 2006. Our curriculum and programs remain, as always, based in the diverse and flexible College of Arts and Sciences, but we are constantly developing new programs and partnerships that engage our talented colleagues and students from the entire campus.

It has been a big year for honors in the Department. I am very pleased to announce several highlights. In June, Prof. Gwen Bennet received a major three-year Luce Foundation East Asian Archaeology and Early History Grant for Field Projects, which will enable her to pursue the Chengdu Plain Archaeological Survey Project in Sichuan, China, with distinguished collaborators from Harvard, Beijing University, and Taiwan National University. She is also a Co-Principal Investigator with the same collaborators for the same project, sponsored by Wenner Gren Foundation. Last April, Prof. Rebecca DeRoo received the distinguished Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies for her book The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (2006), and delivered a lecture at Tufts University at the time she was awarded the prize last spring. Prof. Alicia Walker is the current recipient of a Woodrow Wilson 2008 Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, and she is spending part of her current leave as a Visiting Research Scholar, in the Program of Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, during the fall of 2008. We are proud of all three of them! Moreover, Professors Childs, DeRoo, Klein, and Walker have all just received Faculty Research Grants to fund their research projects over the coming year and summer, so it is shaping up to be a productive year for research. (Please read individual faculty profiles to get more news).

Our scholarly expertise is, as ever, in demand. Prof. Angela Miller is now garnering national attention following the publication last year of her major textbook, for which she served as lead author of the distinguished team of Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf and Jennifer Roberts. Their volume American Encounters: Art, History and Cultural Identity is fast becoming the new gold standard in the field of American art. She has lectured on this project twice in Germany, and also at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, at the University of Iowa, and at the Smithsonian. This fall Professor William Wallace served as the 2008 Jeannette K. Watson Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, where he presented two public and two classroom lectures on Michelangelo. His topics included the patronage of Michelangelo as sculptor, and “Drawing: A Life,” a lecture held in conjunction with the current exhibition of Michelangelo drawings from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence. Prof. Sarantis Symeonoglou continues his research on the traces of Odysseus on the Greek island of Ithaka, and looks forward to a spring 2009 sabbatical to get back to his book that examines the relationship of Homer’s account of Odysseus to the archaeological record, which Professor Symeonoglou has done so much to unearth, literally, over the years. And Professor Childs joined the celebrations of the 200h anniversary of Honoré Daumier’s birth by lecturing on caricature at the University of Missouri, and at a major French history conference at Rutgers. She also gave a paper in the “Crossing Cultures” conference, the 32nd CIHA international art historians’ congress, held at the University of Melbourne last winter. She enjoyed meeting with WU alumni groups in Hawaii and Australia along the way.

We also welcome new faculty to our ranks. John Klein joined the faculty permanently this year as Associate Professor, following a two-year visiting appointment in 2005-2007. Prof. Klein is a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art, with particular expertise in the work of Henri Matisse, Fauvism, portraiture, modern and contemporary sculpture, and the history and theory of art museums. He is writing a book on the aesthetics and practice of decoration in Matisse’s late career, examining the artist’s projects in ceramic tile, stained glass, metalwork, carpets, and tapestry. This year his essays appear in several exhibition catalogues, among them studies of the fauve portraiture of Kees Van Dongen (at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco) and of the concept of decoration in Matisse (at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). Prof. Klein comes to us from the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he taught for over a decade, and he has held other appointments at Columbia University and the Yale University Art Gallery.

As always, we enjoy a booming cohort of students: currently about 80 majors, 40 minors, and 26 students in the MA/PhD. program. Our students come from all parts of the world, and often have double majors or minors in closely related fields (like painting or printmaking) or perhaps more surprising, in the sciences, social work and business. We are proud to be a group of committed and energetic teachers, and our central mission of teaching continues to prosper, as we learn from each other, our students and our distinguished colleagues with whom we frequently collaborate. This year we are offering, for example, four advanced seminars co-taught with colleagues from both Arts and Sciences, and from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. This fall Prof. Miller is teaching “Theory for Art History: Modernism, Modernity and Postmodernism” with Dr. Sabine Eckmann, the Director of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. They are using our superb museum collections in their class to explore the application of theory to the interpretation of works of art. Indeed, most of us are teaching constantly with the works at hand and in storage at the Kemper Art Museum, the St Louis Art Museum and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Our students are currently participating in a range of symposia, internships, and research projects at all of these fine institutions.

In the spring, Prof. Miller is teaming up again, this time with Prof. Iver Bernstein of History to offer a large seminar on “The American Trauma: Representing the Civil War in Art, Literature and Politics.” Prof. John Klein is collaborating in the spring with Prof. Eric Mumford of the College of Architecture in the Sam Fox School, to offer a wide-ranging course on “Theories of Modern Art and Architecture” and Dr Mumford is coming with us this month to Chicago on a department field trip, where he will lead us on an early Sunday morning walking tour of Chicago Loop architecture. And I will be offering a new seminar in spring 2009 on “Art and Politics of the Belle Epoque in France” with Prof. Steve Hause of the History Department. In anticipation of a major conference for the Society of French Historical Studies to be held in St Louis in March, Prof. Hause and I are co-curating a small exhibition of political caricature for the Kemper’s Teaching Gallery on the topic of “The Political Eye,’” of obvious interest in this election year. Other new courses to be offered this year include a seminar on the “Silk Road” (Prof. Bennett) and a survey of Mesoamerican Art and Architecture, with a colleague from across the street, Dr. Matthew Robb of the St Louis Art Museum’s Department of Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. To enhance our Asian offerings, Dr. Mayu Fujikawa will offer a course in Japanese Arts and Society in the spring. We hope to keep developing and deepening our curriculum both in areas that are our long-held strengths, and in a global reach, we hope to expand into new areas of non-western art, architecture, and visual culture.

Our long-standing commitment to excellence in teaching and mentoring has been attracting attention. Last spring two of our faculty were honored by the graduate students. Prof DeRoo received an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, and Prof. Walker also received a Certificate of Special Recognition for Excellence in Mentoring, both from the Graduate Student Senate and the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. And the previous spring (2007), both Prof. Paul Crenshaw and Prof. Angela Miller received similar certificates of recognition for their commitment to mentoring. That means about half the department has been recognized for teaching in just two years, and we are proud of everyone! And I was recently surprised and delighted to learn I will be receiving a Distinguished Faculty Award at the Founder’s Day dinner this November. If you are in town, please come join us. All of us have a lot to celebrate!

We still sponsor one or two major field trips a year, to take our students to visit some of the country’s most impressive museums and galleries. This October, for example, Prof. Klein has organized a two-day marathon trip to Chicago for a group of 35 of our faculty, graduate students and majors. Most of us will fit in all of the group destinations, which include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, the Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Millenium Park, a walking tour of the architectural highlights of the Loop, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Faculty will visit the sites with students, some of whom will be seeing art they are currently studying in courses. (I am taking several students in my current lecture course up to study Seurat’s Grande Jatte, for example, at the Art Institute. There is no substitute for looking at the real thing, together!) These trips open our eyes, stimulate learning, and consolidate friendships. Many students tell us the department fieldtrips stand out as some of their best memories from their time at WU.

We believe strongly in fostering excellent teaching practice among our graduate students. Thanks to the fine support of an alumna, Barbara Pollard (BA 1976) and Mitch Stein of Scarsdale, New York, we have recently been able to endow an annual teaching prize for one of our graduate teaching assistants. The first prize went to Noelle Paulson in 2007, and in 2008, Clara Barnhart earned the second one (both are PhD students in Modern/American art). We are also instituting a new undergraduate prize this spring, thanks to the generosity of Tim Murphy (BA, minor in art history, 2007) and his family. The Murphy Prize will be awarded each graduation to the senior who has written the best essay that year in any of our art history and archaeology classes (senior Honors Theses excluded). This prize may go to a major or a minor, or to any student who has done exceptional work in our classes, and this new award thus honors Tim, who was an economics major, but had a second passion for the history of modern art. Thanks to all of these generous donors to the department!

Betha Whitlow, our Visual Resources Curator, and her intrepid staff of professionals and students, keep pushing us into the 21st century, as they continue to instruct us all in our state-of-the-art equipment and to move us all into the web 2.0 generation. Our grad students get up-to-date training (sample sessions this year are on Google Tools, and RefWorks) and we are all getting more mobile, compact and efficient in our use of today’s technologies. And Nancy Rubin, our devoted Administrative Assistant, is at the heart of our daily lives, keeping us organized, on schedule, and in good humor. Well, most of the time!

Whether you live abroad or around the corner, we are always happy to hear your news, or to give you a quick tour of our still-new home, when you can drop by. Best wishes for a productive year.

Elizabeth C. Childs

Chair