Congratulations to Associate Professor Sibel Zandi-Sayek

Sibel Zandi-Sayek is the recipient of the M. Fuad Köprülü Prize for her book Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840-1880 (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). The prize recognizes the best book in the area of Ottoman and Turkish Studies published in the previous year and is sponsored by the Turkish Studies Association. The Köprülü Prize Committee praised Professor Zandi-Sayek’s book:

“Assimilating a remarkable variety of source materials from cadastral and municipal records to public health debates, Ottoman Izmir presents an elegant yet accessible study. The book captures the intense transformation of the city’s physical form, institutional structures, and patterns of civic engagement. It highlights the vital role property ownership played in defining the scope and boundaries of urban citizenship. Most refreshingly Ottoman Izmir contributes to our understanding of urban modernization as a process which was not simply “imported” from Europe, but shaped by its own local and imperial context.”

Associate Professor Nicole M. Santiago

In May Professor Santiago held a solo exhibition tilted "The Sweet Life" at First Street Gallery in New York, NY. Santiago's work explores the contrast between unabashed indulgence and the selfless constraints of motherhood.

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of East Asain Studies, Xin Wu

Professor Wu's latest book titled Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958–2010 was recently published. This book addresses the issue of translation between visual arts and landscape design. Deeply influenced by Chinese art and thought, Johanson was an American artist working in postwar New York as a painter and sculptor. Over the course of her 50-year career she shifted from painting and sculpture to public garden and environmental art. Professor Wu’s richly detailed book explores Johanson’s evolving artistic process and the creative search that drove it. Following Johanson's artistic development, from its formation in the 1960s American contemporary art scene to the very present day, across the fields of art, architecture, garden, civil engineering and environmental aesthetics, this research investigates the process of art creation in interdisciplinary perspective. The book is also the first comprehensive scholarly study on this important artist of the second half of the twentieth-century.

Sculpture Professor Elizabeth Mead

Professor Mead started her summer with an exhibition of her work, titled "Various Objects: Things on the Horizon," at the Linda Matney Gallery here in Williamsburg.  This summer Professor Mead was invited to be artist-in-residence as the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. While in London, Mead mounted two exhibitions of her work, "Material Matter(s)" and "Around Round Rectangular Perspectives" and delivered two talks, one in conjunction with one of her studio exhibitions and the other at the UCL Art Museum, "What matter, parts?" that accompanied a "pop-up" exhibition she curated at the museum. Later in the summer Mead gave the keynote along with Carey Bagdassarian for the conference, symbASA in Ashville, North Carolina.

Congratulations to Associate Professor Alan Braddock

Alan Braddock's article "Armory Shows: The Spectacular Life of a Building Type to 1913" will appear in the Fall 2013 issue of American Art.  His essay "From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History" will be published in The Blackwell Companion to American Art, edited by John Davis, in 2014.  Another essay, "Home of the Hummingbird: Thaxter, Hassam, and the Aesthetics of Bird Conservation," will appear in the catalog of the 2014 exhibition The Artist's Garden, organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Professor Braddock has been awarded a Belknap Fellowship to teach in residence at Princeton University during Fall 2014.  He is also co-curating the exhibition "Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment," to be held at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016-17.