Bettman Lecture Series

Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Lectures are 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.

All events are held in room 612 of Schermerhorn Hall.

Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

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"

Fall 2011 – Spring 2012

Fall 2010 – Spring 2011