Visiting Scholars

Melody Deusner

Ph.D., University of Delaware
In residence: September 2010--August 2013
Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History

Dr. Deusner specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, with particular emphasis on the study of American painting and mass culture in an international context. Her doctoral dissertation, “A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons, 1870–1914,” probed the startling convergence between the pursuit of an art for art’s sake—which promotes the activity of selection, arrangement, and the orchestration of harmonious visual effects as the true substance of picture-making—and the organizational imperatives of systems management and network building in the political and corporate spheres in turn-of-the-century Britain and America. Her research has been sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Luce Foundation/ACLS, the Kress Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with ongoing support provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Professor Deusner will teach several undergraduate and graduate courses for the Department of Art History during her fellowship.

Mark Kauntze

Ph.D., University of Bristol
In residence: September 2010--August 2013
Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Studies

Mark Kauntze’s research focuses on the Latin literature and philosophy of the High Middle Ages. He is particularly interested in the transmission of ancient thought, the theory and practice of rhetoric, and medieval accounts of the history of philosophy. He is completing a monograph on the twelfth-century poet Bernardus Silvestris, and working on a critical edition of the second part of Roger Bacon’s Opus maius. He teaches Medieval Latin in the Graduate Classics Cluster.

Jose Luis Reynoso

Ph.D. in Culture and Performance, UCLA
In residence: September 2012--August 2013
Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies

Jose Luis Reynoso's interests include critical theory and pedagogy, the explicit and implicit politics of choreography, ideologies of artistic identity, and the role of corporeality in knowledge production. Applying these perspectives, Jose writes and teaches about various aspects of modern/cotemporary dance in Mexico and the U.S. with an emphasis on the intersection of race, gender, class and sexuality. In his dissertation, Jose examines the role that ballet and modern dance played in the construction of post-revolutionary, modern Mexico from 1919 to 1940. Reynoso has presented at several conferences, including Dance Under Construction, Danza Teorica, Congress on Research in Dance, and the Society of Dance History Scholars. As a performer and choreographer, he has collaborated with multiple choreographers and performance artists including Hae Kyung Lee, David Roussève, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, and Roberto Sifuentes. He has also presented his own choreographic work nationally and internationally. Jose is teaching Cultural Studies of Dance this Fall. 

Mary Roberts

John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art
Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney
In residence: July 2011--February 2012

Professor Roberts has a grant from the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects scheme to conduct research on her project, "Peripheral Horizons: Reinterpreting Orientalist visual culture through a comparative study of women's Orientalism in Australia, the USA, and Europe, 1855-1914."

Iain Boyd Whyte

Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh, Director of VARIE (Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh), and Chair of RIHA (International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art)
In residence: September 2011--October 2011

Iain Boyd Whyte has published extensively on architectural modernism in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, and on post-1945 urbanism. Beyond architecture, he has written on twentieth-century German art and on Anglo-German literary relations. His most recent publication is Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte (eds.), Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science (2011).

The goal of his sojourn at the Alice Kaplan Institute will be the completion of two major writing projects: Metropolis Berlin: 1880-1940; and German Architecture in the 20th Century.The former is a comprehensive anthology of texts on Berlin focused on the planning, building, and inhabiting of Berlin in a key period of expansion and modernization.  The latter is a monograph on German architecture from unification in 1871 to reunification in 1989 and beyond until the end of the twentieth century.