THE ART HISTORY FACULTY


Nicola (Nick) Camerlenghi
Assistant Professor
218 Design Building
ncamerle@lsu.edu
BA Yale University
SMArchS MIT
MA, PhD Princeton University

Professor Camerlenghi specializes in early Christian and medieval art and architecture. His dissertation, completed in 2007, presents a diachronic history of the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome as recounted through the architectural transformations that took place at the venerable site. His research in Rome was funded by the Swiss Institute of Rome and the Bibliotheca Hertziana, the latter through a grant from the Kress Foundation. Professor Camerlenghi has presented papers at major conferences in Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. He is currently working on a book-length manuscript provisionally titled “Biography of a Basilica: San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome.” His articles and contributions appear in: Bollettino dei Monumenti, Musei, e Gallerie Pontificie; San Paolo in Vaticano; and Rom, Meisterwerke der Baukunst (all pictured below). His broader academic interests include the use of technology in art history, Renaissance architectural drawings, the architecture and urbanism of Rome, the history of domes, and, closer to home, the history of the American college campus from utopia to display-case. While in Italy and since arriving in Louisiana Professor Camerlenghi has also cultivated his interest in food and food history.

Susan Ryan
Professor
205 Design Building
faryan@lsu.edu
BA Douglass College, Rutgers University
MA, PhD University of Michigan
Research Assistant Yale University (3 years)

Professor Ryan teaches contemporary and new media art history and is a Fellow of the LSU Center for Computational Technology (CCT). She helped found an interdisciplinary Art/Engineering undergraduate minor at LSU entitled AVATAR. Currently she is researching artists’ wearable technology. With Patrick Lichty, she curated Social Fabrics, an exhibition sponsored by the Leonardo Educational Forum, for the College Art Association, Dallas 2008 (http://www.socialfabrics.org/). She has lectured internationally on dress and creative technology, and contributed articles to Leonardo and the online journal Intelligent Agent. She has also published two books focused on artists’ autobiographical practices: she assembled, edited, and annotated American painter Marsden Hartley's autobiography (Somehow a Past, MIT Press, 1996 and 1998), and authored Robert Indiana: Figures of Speech (Yale University Press, 2000). For more information about Professor Ryan’s work, please visit www.artistory.us

Darius A. Spieth
Associate Professor
219 Design Building
dspieth@lsu.edu
BA University of Nebraska-Lincoln
MA University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MBA (Finance) International University of Japan
PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Prior to joining the Art History faculty at LSU, Professor Spieth served as Philip and Lynn Straus Curatorial Fellow at the Fogg Art Museum, and worked for a commercial gallery dealing in Russian avant-garde art domiciled in Cologne, Germany, and Zug, Switzerland. A specialist in early modernism, Professor Spieth focuses in his scholarship on the interrelationships between art, intellectual history, and economics. Besides Prints from the Serenissima: Connoisseurship and the Graphic Arts in Eighteenth-Century Venice, an exhibition catalog written for the Harvard University Art Museums, he has published Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians (University of Delaware Press, 2007), which explores the Masonic contexts for the revived Isis cult in Napoleonic France. Recently completed book chapters and articles include: “Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il mondo nuovo: Peepshow Entertainment and the Politics of Nostalgia,” “The French Context of The Great Mirror of Folly: John Law, Rococo Culture, and the Riches of the New World,” and “How Did Japanese Investments Influence Art Prices?” (with Takato Hiraki, Akitoshi Ito, and Naoya Takezawa). Supported by an NEH grant, Professor Spieth’s current research investigates Art, Auctions, and Public Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century Paris.

Justin St. P. Walsh, RPA
Assistant Professor
321B Art Building
jwalsh@lsu.edu
BA Vanderbilt University
MA University of Minnesota
PhD University of Virginia

Professor Walsh teaches Greek and Roman art and archaeology, and is listed in the Register of Professional Archaeologists. He has worked on excavations in the United States, Spain, Jordan, and Italy, and has worked at the site of Morgantina, in east-central Sicily, since 1999. His current research concerns imported pottery found there, and the implications of that material for a new consumer-oriented perspective on the ancient economy. The final results will be published in Morgantina Studies, to be co-authored with Professors Carla Antonaccio (Duke University) and Jenifer Neils (Case Western Reserve University). Other work includes articles on architectural sculpture from Thasos and on the relationship between metal and ceramic vessels in the ancient world. Professor Walsh has received several awards, including a Fulbright Grant to Greece in 2002-2003, a Rome Prize in 2003-2004, and the inaugural Arthur Ross Advanced Research Fellowship from the Institute for Classical Architecture and Classical America in 2008. In 2009, he received the Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Download: Justin Walsh's CV
Download: Exchange and Influence: Hybridity and the Gate Reliefs of Thasos article

Michelle C. Wang
Assistant Professor
415 Design Building
mwang@lsu.edu
BA University of Chicago
MA University of Kansas
PhD Harvard University

Professor Wang teaches courses in Asian art history and specializes in the study of Chinese art from the Han through Tang Dynasties (3rd century BCE–10th century CE). Her main area of research is Buddhist art in China. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Pittsburgh Foundation. In 2006, she co-curated an exhibit of Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) small-scale animal sculptures titled “A Bronze Menagerie: Mat Weights of Early China” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which resulted in an exhibition catalogue by the same title for which she was the main author. She has also held museum internships at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as a research assistantship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Currently, she is at work on articles concerning the conceptions of mandalas in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) and mandala and altar diagrams from Dunhuang, in addition to a book manuscript titled From Dharani to Mandala: Orality and Visuality in the Buddhist Art of Medieval China. She blogs about topics relating to Asian art, popular culture, and current events at: www.asianartlibrary.blogspot.com

Mark Zucker
J. Franklin Bayhi Alumni Professor
208 Design Building
mzucker@lsu.edu
PhD Columbia University

A specialist in Renaissance art, Professor Zucker has contributed seven volumes on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian engraving to The Illustrated Bartsch, a definitive series of scholarly reference books on Old Master prints. He has also published on various aspects of Renaissance art in leading international journals and is currently working on relationships between Italian Renaissance art and literature. Professor Zucker was the recipient in 2001 of LSU's Distinguished Faculty Award and was named J. Franklin Bayhi Alumni Professor of Art in 2003. He chaired a sesion on "The Italian Renaissance Print" at the 2002 conference of the College Art Association, and his paper "Homeliness and Humor in Renaissance Italy: Tales of Ugly (and Witty) Artists and Other Paragons of Ugliness" won the award for the best article of 2004 published in the journal Explorations in Renaissance Culture. Zucker is currently Professor and Art History Area Coordinator in Renaissance and Baroque Art.