Bettman Lecture Series
Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Series is an annual program of monthly lectures in art history sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Endowed with a bequest from Linda Bettman, a former graduate student of the department, the lectures are named in her honor.
Lectures in the fall will take place as live webinars at the customary time of 6:15 pm ET (New York), except for the lecture given by Professor Mario Bevilacqua, who will be presenting from Florence, Italy at 12 pm ET (New York), January 31st. We intend to hold spring lectures in person at 610 Schermerhorn, pending potential travel and safety restrictions.
Bettman webinars are open to the public, but only registered attendees will be able to access the event. Links to register for each talk will be posted below; after filling out a short form, you will receive a link via email enabling you to participate as an attendee.
The Bettman series is coordinated by two graduate students, serving on a committee with two faculty members, who act in an advisory role. These are volunteer positions designed to foster community and intellectual engagement within the department. The series is intended to be a student-run initiative and the selection of student members is in the hands of the serving graduate students. (For information on how to become a Bettman series coordinator, please see here.)
Fall 2021
Tuesday, September 14th
Irene Small
Princeton University
“Circling Black Square: Discovery Against Invention”
Register here
Tuesday, September 28th
Mary Roberts
University of Sydney
“Benjamin, Poe and the Rank Orient of the Nineteenth-Century Interior”
Register here
Monday, October 18th
Sheila Dillon
Duke University
“The Portrait Statuary from the Library of Pantainos Complex in the Athenian Agora: Dealing with Legacy Material”
Register here
Spring 2022
Monday, January 31st at 12 pm ET (New York time)
Mario Bevilacqua
Università di Firenze
“Maps, Trees of Knowledge, and Encyclopaedias: Cartography in Rome, 17th-18th Centuries”
Register here
Monday, February 14th
Erin Thompson
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
“Kingdom Under Glass: Repatriation of Nepali Sacred Art”
Monday, March 21st
Dorothy Wong
University of Virginia
“What Did Miraculous Images do in the Chinese Buddhist Tradition: A Preliminary Typology”
Monday, April 18th
Sarah Lewis
Harvard University
“Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law”
Fall 2019
September 23rd
Robert Nelson
Yale University
“A Byzantine Icon in Medieval Thessaloniki and Renaissance Rome”
October 21st
Erica James
University of Miami
"After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary"
November 18th
Deborah Howard
University of Cambridge
“Venice and the Sea”
Spring 2020
March 2nd
Stanley Abe
Duke University
“Imagining Sculpture”
April 20th
Mary Roberts
University of Sydney
“Benjamin, Poe and the Rank Orient of the Nineteenth-Century Interior”
April 27th
Gülru Necipoğlu
Harvard University
"Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Empire: Arts, Politics, and Commerce in the Construction of the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman's Magnificence”
October 1
Nancy SteinhardtUniversity of Pennsylvania
"Shoroon Bumbagar"
November 19
Steven NelsonUCLA
"Learning from Johannesburg: Moshekwa Langa’s Maps of Desire"
November 26
Clara BargelliniUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de México
"Samuel Stradanus: How Engraving Began in the New World"
Spring 2019
February 18
Charmaine Nelson
McGill University
"Enslaved Black Females in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements"
April 8
Christine Mehring
University of Chicago
"Material Matters"
CANCELLED:
April 8
Valentin Groebner
Universität Luzern
"Visualizing the Absence of Dirty Things. Images of Purity, medieval and modern"
March 19
Alessandro Nova
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
"Grace, Splendor, and Terribilità in the Art Theory of the 16th Century"
April 2
Caroline van Eck
King's College, University of Cambridge
"The Material Presence of Absent Antiquities: Collecting Excessive Objects and the Revival of the Past"
April 16
Kishwar Rizvi
Yale University
"Mosque/Museum: Religious history and 'soft culture' in the UAE and Qatar."
September 25
Whitney Davis
University of California, Berkeley
"Hegel's 'Symbolic Art' and Cosmological Perspectivism"
October 30
Ping Foong
Seattle Art Museum
"On the authority of painters at the Song dynasty court"
December 4
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
University of California, Berkeley
"Ingres's Creoles"
September 19
John Durham Peters
"A Short Media History of Clouds"
October 10
Liz Diller
"Unfinished Business"
March, 6
Frank Fehrenbach
"Materiality, Factual and Actual: The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture"
April, 3
Dagmar Schäfer
"Dynastic Knowledge and the Knowledge of Dynasties: Politics and the History of Scientific Change in China"
November 23
Charles Barber
"Reading an Icon of the Black Mohammed: Georgios Klontzas and Islam"
December 7
Mary Miller
"The Trouble with 864: Maya Art of the Late 9th Century"
December 14
Huey Copeland
"In the Shadow of the Negress"
February 29
Michael Ann Holly
"The Back of the Painted Beyond"
March 28
Kavita Singh
"Frictional Heritage: Museums between Cultures"
April 25
Stephen J. Campbell
"Against Titian"
Monday, October 6, 6-8 p.m.
Lina Bolzoni
"Memory Palaces: the Renaissance and the Contemporary World"
Monday, October 27, 6-8 p.m.
Marc Gotlieb
"Imitation is Suicide: Teacher-Student Disasters in Nineteenth-Century Art"
Monday, November 24, 6-8 p.m.
Jesús Escobar
"Lost Madrid: The Royal Palace of the Spanish Habsburgs"
Monday, January 26, 6-8 p.m. (This Bettman lecture has been cancelled due to weather and will be rescheduled)
Charles Barber
"Whose Modernism? El Greco and Art's History"
Monday, March 9th, 6-8 p.m.
Etienne Jollet
"Chardin's Objects: Proprieties, Properties, Possessions."
Monday, March 30, 6-8 p.m.
Bernhard Siegert
"The Figural Line: Sewing, Knotting, Weaving, and Inscribing the Surface 1450 – 1650"
Monday, April 27, 6-8 p.m.
Julia Bryan-Wilson
"Public Labors"
Monday, October 7, 6-8 p.m.
Georges Didi-Huberman
"Film, Politics, and Poetry: On Pier Paolo Pasolini"
Wednesday, November 6, 6-8 p.m.
Griselda Pollock
"Raphael After the Holocaust: When and Where is History in Art?"
Monday, December 9, 6-8 p.m.
Erika Naginski
"Impossible Design: Porsenna's Tomb and French Visionary Architecture"
Monday, February 3, 6-8 p.m.
Finbarr Barry Flood
"Sanctified Sandals: Relics of the Prophet in an Era of Technological Reproduction"
Monday, March 3, 6-8 p.m.
Kirk Savage
"The Corpse and the Name: Alexander Gardner and the Origins of the Modern War Memorial"
Monday, April 7, 6-8 p.m.
Paul Crossley
"The Myth of the Cathedral"
Monday, May 5, 6-8 p.m.
Luke Syson
"Sculpting the Immaterial in Fifteenth Century Italy"
Monday, October 1, 6-8 p.m.
Jas Elsner
"Green Curtains and Picture Covers: Towards an Archaeology of Pictorial Closet"
Professor Jas' Elsner has held the Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University since 1999. He has also been a regular Visiting Professor of the History of Art at the University of Chicago since 2003. His research focuses on the art of the Roman world, broadly conceived to include late antiquity as well as the early middle ages, Byzantium and the pre-Christian Classical world. Professor Elsner's research engages with the topic of reception in various contexts, from ancient ritual and pilgrimage to literary description and modern collecting and historiography.
Monday, November 12, 6-8 p.m.
David Morgan
"Likeness and Iconicity in Modern Images of Jesus"
Professor Morgan is Chair of the Department of Religion and Professor of Religion at Duke University. His major interests are the history of religious visual and print culture and American religious and cultural history. At Duke he teaches courses in the areas of American religious history, visual theory and the visual culture of religion.
Monday, January 28, 6-8 p.m.
Simon Gikandi
"Rethinking the Popular Arts in a Global World"
Professor Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. His major fields of research and teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britian, the "Black" Atlantic, and the African Diaspora. He is also interested in the encounter between European and African languages in the modern period, literature and human rights, and writing and cultural politics.
He is the author of many books and articles including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature and Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. His latest book is Slavery and the Culture of Taste.
Monday, February 25, 6-8 p.m.
John Pinto
"Architecture and the Representation of Power: Filippo Juvarra in a European Perspective"
Monday, March 25, 6-8 p.m.
Julian Stallabrass
"Elite Art in an Age of Populism"
Julian Stallabrass is a lecturer, writer, curator and photographer. He lectures in modern and contemporary art, including political aspects of the globalized contemporary art world, postward British art, the history of photography and new media art. Additional research interests lie in the relation between art and visual mass culture and the politics of modern and contemporary art.
He is the author of Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, Locus Solus, a book about the Newcastle-based artist-led curatorial organization Locus+, Internet Art: the Online Clash of Culture and Commerce, and Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. He also writes art criticism for many publications, including Tate, Photoworks, Art Monthly, and the New Statesman.
Monday, April 29, 6-8 p.m.
Carolyn Dean
"Building Meaning: Significance in Inka Stonemasonry"
Monday, September 26, 6:15 p.m.
Christopher Wood
The Uninvited
Monday, November 21, 6:15 p.m.
Yukio Lippit
Ito Jakuchu's Colorful Realm of Living Beings
Monday, February 27, 6:15 p.m.
Tonio Hölscher
Penelope in Persepolis: Or The Power of Images to Stop War with an Arch-Enemy
Monday, March 26, 6:15 p.m.
Ann Bermingham
Making Motion Pictures in
18th-century London: Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon
Monday, April 30, 6:15 p.m.
Maria Gough
Radical Tourists in Soviet Photographic Utopia
September 27, 6 p.m.
Robert Bagley, Princton University
Gombrich among the Egyptians: The History of Art as a Contest between Seeing and Knowing
February 14, 6 p.m.
Thierry de Duve, Université de Lille 3
Joseph Beuys and the German Past, Tentatively
February 28, 6 p.m.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University
Boucher's Interiority
March 28, 6 p.m.
Rosalind Blakesley, University of Cambridge
Ladies-in-Waiting in Waiting: the Portraiture of Adolescence in Eighteenth-Century Russia
April 18, 6 p.m.
Patricia L. Rubin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Pisanello's Topknot: Facing up to Fifteenth-century Portraiture
September 21st
Gregory Levine, University of California at Berkeley
The Faltering Brush: Chan/Zen Death Verse Calligraphies and the Master's Graphical 'Vanishing Point'
October 26th
Andrea Giunta, University of Texas at Austin
Conspiracy & Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Imageries of Institutional Destabilization
November 30th
Wu Hung, University of Chicago
Shitao (1642-1707) and the Traditional Chinese Conception of Ruins
January 25th
Susan Alcock, Brown University
February 22nd
Mitchell Merback, Johns Hopkins University
Why Nobody's Freedom is Depicted in Hans Sebald Beham's Impossible
March 29th
Sarah McPhee, Emory University
September 23rd
Tim Barringer, Yale University
October 27th
Alexander Nemerov, Yale University
The Aesthetics of Abraham Lincoln
November 24th
Jean Michel Massing, University of Cambridge
The Image of Mediterranean Slavery in the Seventeenth Century
February 23rd
Eve Blau, Harvard University
Transparency: Architecture and the Contradictions of Modernity in the 1920s
March 30th
Cecelia Klein, University of California, Los Angeles
Death in the Hands of Strangers: Aztec Sacrifice in the Western Imagination, 1521-2006
April 27th
Victor Stoichita, University of Fribourg
September 24th
Andrew Robison, The National Gallery of Art
The Marriage of Venice and Rome
October 29th
Paul Binski, Cambridge University
'Working by Words Alone': French Architects, Scholasticism and the Professions in the Later 13th Century
November 26th
Stephen Campbell, Johns Hopkins University
Andrea Mantegna circa 1450: Imitation and the Force of Images
February 25th
Brigid Doherty, Princeton University
Rilke, Cézanne, and the Origins of Introjection
March 31st
Gerhard Wolf, Max-Planck-Institut
April 28th
Jennifer Roberts, Harvard University
Pictures in Transit
September 25th
Howard Bloch, Yale University
The Bayeux Tapestry and the Ends of History
October 30th
Timon Screech, The School of Oriental and African Studies, The University of London
The Voyage of the 'New Year's Gift': A Cargo of Paintings from London to Japan, 1614
November 20th
Alexander Nagel, The University of Toronto
Anthropologies of the Image, ca. 1500
February 26th
James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Is Art History Global?
March 26th
Howard Burns, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
April 30th
Geoffrey Batchen, The City University of New York
Analog: Another History of Photography
September 26th
Richard Meyer, University of Southern California
What was Contemporary Art?
October 24th
Robin Cormack, Courtauld Institute of Art
From Theory to Attribution: How 'Crusader Art' and Byzantium Can Change Your Art History
November 28th
Lothar Ledderose, Heidelberg University
Finding Spaces: Strategies of the Commentator in Chinese Art
February 27th
Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University
Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Hitler-Terror and the Reichstag Fire Conspiracy
March 27th
Irene Winter, Harvard University
April 24th
Monica Juneja, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg
Ordering the World as Image — Narration and Communication in Art from the Mughal Courts
September 27th
Inauguration of the Bettman Lectures
Film screening, La Leçon de Meyer Schapiro (dir. Barbara Rose)
Discussion, Thomas Crow, Hubert Damisch, David Rosand
October 25th
Jeffry Hamburger, Harvard University
'The various writings of humanity': A Sermon by Johannes Tauler on Hildegard of Bingen's 'Liber Scivias'
November 29th
T. J. Clark, University of California at Berkeley
The Sabine Women and Lévi-Strauss
January 31st
Margaret Olin, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The Presence of Photographs
February 28th
Joseph Koerner, Courtauld Institute of Art
Bosch's Enmity
March 28th
Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Paris IV—Sorbonne
The Philosopher and the Art Historian: An Impossible Dialogue? Meyer Schapiro's Response to Heidegger's Text on Van Gogh
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