Faculty News

• Lisa Bauman is enjoying teaching art history full time this year as a term professor. She brings us her much appreciated expertise in Italian Renaissance and early modern art. Last spring, she taught a four-week course for the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program on Renaissance and baroque art.
• Lawrence Butler presented scholarly papers on his two main research topics: Islamic architecture in China at the Asian Studies Development Conference in Honolulu and the sculpture of the Hagia Sophia at the World History Association Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. His article “Mosques and Muslim Identity along China’s Trade Routes” was published in an anthology of best work from East-West Connections: Review of Asian Studies. He also wrote articles for the Oxford Dictionary of American Art last year on American medievalists. He led a study tour to Turkey this past March, and in the summer he will teach on the University of Virginia Semester at Sea voyage around the Mediterranean cities. In February, he lectured on the Freer’s Islamic art collection for the Resident Associates Program.
• Welcome to Nicole De Armendi, our new term professor. She comes to us from the University of Tulsa, where she taught Art since Mid Century, Arts of 60s, Arts of 70s, and a graduate seminar on new directions in sculpture. She completed a doctorate last December from Virginia Commonwealth University with a dissertation on phenomenological labyrinths. Her current research project is to translate her dissertation into a book. Last year, she cochaired the Southeastern College Art Conference panel “In Pieces: Fragmentation in Contemporary Art” with her friend and former colleague Margaret Richardson. This past summer, she participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute in Chicago “Mapping and Art of the Americas,” which supported her interest in a new project on mapping strategies in contemporary art. She looks forward to working on articles this year and her new classes at Mason.
• Robert DeCaroli is glad to be back on campus after a semester of leave that gave him the opportunity to finish the first draft of a new book manuscript with the working title of “Image Problems: Art, Text and the Development of the Buddha Image in Early South Asia.” In addition, his article on South Asian serpent deities at the fifth-century Buddhist cave of Ajanta is coming out in Ars Orientalis any day now. Last year, the Qin Dynasty terra-cotta warriors visited town and he was kept busy giving public lectures about them at the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society, and Exploritas. More recently, he reviewed the wonderful exhibition of Cambodian bronzes on display at the Sackler Gallery called “Gods of Angkor” for CAA Review.