Photographer, New York
Studio Manager, Guggenheim Museum, New York

“Artist’s Lecture”

Assistant Professor of History of Art
Vanderbilt University

Mireille Lee (Occidental College, A.B.; Bryn Mawr, M.A., Ph.D.) teaches courses on the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt.  A specialist in Greek art and archaeology, she has a particular interest in the construction of gender in ancient visual and material culture.  Her first monograph, Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.  Her current research focuses on the ancient Greek mirrors as social objects.  Her research has been supported by: the American Council of Learned Societies; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, among others.

“Women’s Ways of Knowing: A Phenomenology of Mirrors in Ancient Greece”

Professor of Art and Art History, The College of New Jersey

“A Thoroughly Modern Major: Photography, Identity, and Politics at the Court of Hyderabad, India”

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rapidly-changing courtly culture of the Indo-Islamic state of Hyderabad coalesced around the qualities of cosmopolitanism, hospitality, and sportsmanship. This talk unpacks the role photography played in defining that culture. It will do so by focusing on the Nizam of Hyderabad’s charismatic aide-de-camp, Sir Afsur ul-Mulk, both a prolific patron and celebrated subject of photography. As someone whose image can be read as simultaneously fulfilling and subverting social expectations, Sir Afsur allows us to rethink how categories such as race, religion, and “traditional” courtly culture have been constructed vis-à-vis modernity and modern visuality, as well as how the medium of photography was tied to the growth of a visual culture of “celebrity.” 

Principal, Night Kitchen Interactive

“From Exclusion to Representation: Digital Exhibitions Interpreting Slavery, Disability and Prejudice in American History”

Associate Professor of History of Art and Chair of the Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies, Johns Hopkins University

“We Must Have a Tent!: Exclamations and Elephants at the Metropolitan Museum’s Festival of India Exhibitions”

Professor of Art History, Lycoming College
President, Historians of Netherlandish Art

Rembrandt’s One Guilder Print: Value and Invention in “the most beautiful that ever came from the burin of this Master”      

This essay explores how Rembrandt’s Hundred Guilder Print was conceived to rival and surpass several illustrious inventions by Raphael and Leonardo, and to be equated invalue to prints after Raphael. Value and price are measures of esteem and currency, and in the case of the Hundred Guilder Print, they both converge and diverge. Rembrandt combined a central group of Christ blessing the children and a rebuking apostle, with an unprecedented assembly of the Pharisees, the sick, and the rich man in one frame. This non-linear narrative is generally considered as proceeding from Matthew 19. However, Rembrandt ensured that the print could be given a wide application, for it was copied to illustrate the gospel texts Luke 6:17 and Matthew 8:16 in Melchior Küsel’s Icones Biblicae of 1679. The early reception of the print indicates it was immediately recognized as Rembrandt’s master print. This is a case in which a print,  uniquely known by its reputed price, was understood to carry a variety of interpretations from its inception.

Amy Golahny holds the Richmond Chair in Art History at Lycoming College, Williamsport PA, and is currently the president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She has lectured and published extensively on and around Rembrandt. Recently she contributed the entry on Pieter Lastman to Oxford Bibliographies in Art History.

Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Delaware

“Kay WalkingStick, Creative Kinship, and Art History’s Tangled Legs”