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A New Director for Wired!

July 5, 2017

The Wired! community is pleased to announce that Paul Jaskot is joining Duke as a Professor of Art History and Director of the Wired! Lab for digital art history & visual culture.

Photo Credit: DePaul University/Jeff Carrion

Jaskot was previously Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Director of Studio χ at DePaul University. He specializes in the history of modern German architecture and art, with a particular interest in the political history of architecture before, during, and after the Nazi era. He has also published on Holocaust Studies topics more broadly, modern architecture including the history of Chicago architecture, methodological essays on Marxist art history, and diverse topics in Digital Art History. He has authored or edited several monographs and anthologies, including The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

 

Paul has also been deeply involved in Digital Art History issues for the past decade, both as a scholar and as an advocate. In this role, he has been part of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative, an international team of scholars that has been exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze central problems in the history of the Holocaust, including issues rising from the built environment. He has worked most closely with Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine), co-authoring several presentations and essays with her, most recently as part of the anthology Geographies of the Holocaust (University of Indiana Press, 2014), the first volume on the use of GIS for the study of the Holocaust. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources.

From Jaskot’s current mapping project, which examines patterns of commercial, governmental, and infrastructural building in western & Nazi-occupied Europe.

From 2008-2010, he was the President of the College Art Association (CAA). With CAA, he has also participated in various task forces promoting the support of and guidelines for Digital Art History and its professional evaluation. Paul and Anne also co-directed the Samuel  H. Kress Foundation Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History.  He continues to be active with CAA and with the promotion of Digital Art History initiatives nationally.

 

As the Wired! community welcomes Paul Jaskot, we also bid farewell to Wired! Lab cofounder, champion, and Director, Caroline Bruzelius, who will be taking a sabbatical in 2017-18 before her retirement from Duke in summer 2018.

 

Caroline Bruzelius, Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, works on architecture, sculpture, and urbanism in the Middle Ages. She has published on French Gothic architecture (for example, the abbey church of St.-Denis and Notre Dame in Paris) as well as on medieval architecture in Italy, in particular Naples in the 13th and 14th centuries (in both English and Italian editions). She recently published a book on Franciscan and Dominican architecture, Preaching, Building and Burying. Friars in the Medieval City (Yale U. Press, 2014). Bruzelius has also published numerous articles on the architecture of medieval nuns and architectural enclosure, an area in which she did pioneering work. She has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Max-Planck Institute (Hertziana Library), and the Fulbright Association. She is former Director of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at the Medieval Academy.

 

Bruzelius has worked tirelessly with her colleagues to build a vibrant community engages digital technologies in art history and visual culture teaching and research. Beginning with the Wired! course in 2009, Bruzelius’ work in the lab has included the development of such projects as The Lives of Things and The Kingdom of Sicily Image Database. The lab has also seen her cultivation of international collaboration in the form of Visualizing Venice. Her digital art history courses have included extremely popular Gothic Cathedrals, The Mendicant Revolution, and Introduction to Art History: Mapping the Movement of Men & Materials, and others that have resulted in projects such as the Alife Arch App.

Bruzelius with the Alife Arch App student research team, spring 2017.

She also worked to found the MA track in Digital Art History, part of the new MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media. In this program, she most recently advised Lucas Giles, whose thesis formed part of an international collaborative research project that used laser scanning, ground-penetrating radar, 3D modeling, and virtual reality to explore the division of space and the mysteries of a destroyed choir screen in the medieval Sta. Chiara church in Naples.

A section of the Alife Arch, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University.

While on sabbatical, Caroline Bruzelius will start a book, The Cathedral and the City, which explores the social, topographical and economic implications of the gigantic new cathedrals erected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.