Faculty News
- Larry Butler is currently at sea (in a good way), traveling the globe as part of the Semester at Sea Program. This year, he was awarded University Study Leave and will spend the spring working on current research projects. Over the past academic year, he offered new courses, including Introduction to Architecture and a seminar on Constantinople/Istanbul. He organized and spoke at a session on teaching southeast Asian textiles at the College of DuPage in Chicago. Locally, he spoke at the Folger Institute and gave several lecture series on a diverse range of subjects for the Smithsonian Associates.
- Robert DeCaroli was pleased that two of his essays were published as chapters in What’s the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context and Belief in the Past: Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Religion. This year, when not pretending to be the Art History Program director, he gave several public lectures. Recently, he was invited to speak at George Washington University, the Smithsonian, and the International Association of Buddhist Studies in Atlanta. In September, he spoke in a Dusseldorf, Germany. In April, he will participate in a series of talks at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. If you live in the Houston area, please stop by to say hello.
- Although it’s hard for her to believe, Sheila ffolliott will retire in June 2009 after 30 years of teaching at Mason. She won’t fade from the lecture scene, however. Already scheduled are gigs for the Smithsonian Associates and other venues. During the 2007 fall semester, she chose to depart from her normal courses, offering a seminar in the Honors Program on Jamestown to coincide with the 400th anniversary of its founding. ffolliott was a plenary speaker at the annual conference of the Sixteenth Century Studies Association and also presented at conferences in Dallas, Chicago, Sarasota, and Minneapolis. This year, she will participate in the final conference of the series on Medici women patrons sponsored by the German Research Institute, which will meet, appropriately, in Florence. She also continues her involvement with the National Museum of Women in the Arts, serving on its Works of Art Committee.
- Michele Greet’s book Beyond National Identity: Indigenism in Andean Art, 1920-1960 is scheduled for publication by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2009. Greet has been invited to participate in numerous projects related to her research. She gave two talks in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the work of the Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín at Georgetown Universtiy and the Art Museum of the Americas. Greet will travel to Florida Atlantic University in October to give yet another presentation on the artist. This past October, she was interviewed for a documentary on the Ecuadorian artist Camilo Egas. In addition, Greet had two articles on Andean art published in Revista de Historia Procesos and Brújula: revista interdisciplinaria sobre estudios latinoamericanos and presented papers at the American Studies Association annual conference and Mason’s Visual Culture Symposium. She currently is on academic leave from Mason with a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., to begin work on a book on Latin American artists in Paris between the two world wars.