Faculty News

• Professor Lawrence Butler spent fall 2008 on the University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea program (yes, again), circumnavigating the globe with some 800 students and 30 other faculty members. This ship stopped at the Bahamas, Brazil, Namibia, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawaii, and Costa Rica. He particularly enjoyed seeing Brazil and South Africa for the first time and visiting new sites in India and Japan. He taught Museums, Introduction to Architecture, and Asian Art aboard ship, taking students to the very sites and museums in their textbooks. While on study leave least spring, he digitized and updated his Hagia Sophia research for publication and began new work on the Portuguese and Islamic global trading networks, which included two national conference papers, speaking engagements at the Smithsonian, and writing.
• Professor Robert DeCaroli, director of the Art History Program, was pleased that two of his essays are finally in print. These book chapters appear in two different edited volumes: What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context (University of Hawaii Press) and Buddhist Stupas in South Asia (Oxford University Press). If you are interested in Buddhism or are a fan of early South Asian snakelike demigods, please have a look. He also has been in demand as a speaker, giving talks in a wide range of places, including Los Angeles; Houston; Columbus, Ohio; and Dusseldorf, Germany. He will be on leave in the spring to work on his next book, “Image Problems,” which explores the use of figural imagery in early South Asia.  
• Professor Michele Greet’s pathbreaking book Beyond National Identity: Pictorial Indigenism as a Modernist Strategy in Andean Art, 1920-1960 was published by Penn State University Press in November. She also has an essay in the exhibition catalogue for Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (Yale University Press), which opened in October at El Museo del Barrio (elmuseo.org) in New York City. In June, Greet was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to chair a session at the Latin American Studies Association’s annual conference on art and globalization in Latin America. Last year, she was on leave on a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., to begin work on a new book project on Latin American artists in Paris between the two world wars.