Employment, Internships and Fellowships
Art Historian, the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University
The Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University seeks an art historian, whose research and teaching is in contemporary global art and theory. The successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to a multidisciplinary emergent media initiative. Applicants should possess comprehensive knowledge of art historical trends and theoretical issues in all fields of contemporary art.
This is an academic year, tenure-system Assistant Professor or academic specialist appointment, depending upon background and experience, commencing August 16, 2012. Salary competitive and commensurate with experience.
In addition to the undergraduate degree program in Art History and Visual Culture, the department offers undergraduate degrees in Studio (B.A., BFA), Art Education, Apparel and Textile Design (B.A., BFA) and a graduate degree program in Studio Art. Serving over 500 majors, the department is home to nearly 50 faculty and staff, including 30 tenure system faculty, who are committed to active research agendas and creative practice.
Primary teaching responsibilities will include all levels of modern and contemporary art history, art criticism and/or theory, visual culture, new media, plus general art history survey and Interdisciplinary Humanities courses. Exciting opportunities to link with programming in the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum are also possible. The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, is a contemporary art museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, opening on the MSU campus in April 2012. This extraordinary new space will offer unparalleled access to an international exhibition program of contemporary art.
Qualifications: Ph.D. in art history required. Applicants should have broad art historical training, teaching experience, at the college level, plus track records of significant publications in contemporary art. All applications for this position must be submitted electronically, at the Michigan State Human Resources website (http://www.jobs.msu.edu). Please include a letter expressing interest in this position, describing qualifications and experience, a current curriculum vita, a statement of teaching philosophy, sample syllabi (if available) and the names and contact information for three references. In addition, applicants should provide links to publications and curatorial work(s), if relevant.
Alternatively, materials that are not available online should be sent in hard copy format, to:
Contemporary Art History Search
C/O Thomas Berding, Chair -- Department of Art, Art History and Design
Michigan State University
Kresge Art Center, Rm. 113
East Lansing, MI 48824-1119
Review of applications will begin January 6, 2012 and continue until the position is filled.
Art Faculty: Theory, History and Criticism, American University in Cairo
Assistant Professor in Theory, History and Criticism, beginning Fall 2012. The position is within the Art Program in the Department of Performing and Visual Arts. The successful candidate will be responsible for teaching six courses a year, including general survey courses of Visual Arts' History/ Theory/Criticism, as well as a team-taught introductory course that might be conducted with other members of the Department. The successful candidate will be also given the opportunity to teach courses that pertain to his/her areas of expertise and specialization.
Applicants look at the areas of History/Theory/Criticism from local, regional and global cultural perspectives. In this regard, a solid understanding of the Arab world is essential. Candidates for the position also consider issues of contemporary cultural practices from an interdisciplinary vantage point, with specific consideration of how contemporary visual art practices are increasingly informed by various disciplinary media, including film, video arts, graphic design, along with other emerging media. As such, candidates also engage cultural practice as integral to other disciplinary areas such as social, political, economic, institutional and popular culture studies.
Requirements: The successful candidate should have a Ph.D. in anthropology, cultural studies, art-film-design theory, criticism, and curatorial studies, communication studies, or other related area. He or she should have good university/college teaching experience and show evidence of active scholarly research agenda.
Additional Information: Review of applications will begin April 10 , 2012 and continue until the position is filled. Candidates who successfully submit their materials on or before March 1 , 2012 will be assured full consideration.Grants
Call For Papers
Call for Papers: Arab Spring, Artistic Awakening? Art, Resistance and Revolution, a conference panel for the Middle Eastern Studies Association Annual Conference 2012
Organized by Jennifer Pruitt (Smith College) and Dina Ramadan (Bard College)
Since the earliest weeks of the “Arab Spring” critics and commentators have been eager to assert that in something of an awakening, artists from the region are finally being allowed the freedom to express themselves after decades of repression. Exhibitions and symposia soon followed, primarily concerned with the unique and specific role played by artists in the groundswell of grassroots activism, as well as how artists are directly tackling political upheaval in their work.
This panel questions the limitations of prescribing a role for artistic expression based on anachronistic understandings of contemporary revolutions. Given the evolving nature of the “revolutions” we have witnessed over the last year, what is the changing place for artistic production in representing these revolutions?
We invite papers from a range of disciplines that propose possible paradigms through which to understand the complicated relationship between art and revolution. Topics can include the prolific use of media and social networking, the explosion of graffiti art across the walls of the Arab world, and the use of artwork in the ‘counter-revolution’.
Please send paper abstracts (approx 250 words) to jenniferapruitt@gmail.com and dinaramadan@gmail.com by February 10th 2012.
Please see MESA website for more information regarding the conference
http://www.mesa.arizona.edu/annual-meeting/
Conferences
Other Announcements
We are delighted to announce the initial launch of the website for Echo (Sada) for Contemporary Iraqi Art. Visit www.echoiraq.org to learn about our programs, mission, and new developments.
Echo (Sada) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to support the generation, presentation, and preservation of contemporary Iraqi art. It was established to expand artistic possibilities through the support of new works, education programs, documentation and research.
NEW HOPE FOR LOST WORKS OF MODERN ART FROM IRAQ Online Archive Educates and Encourages Public Participation to Trace Lost Works
The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA), located at http://artiraq.org/maia/, was made public this week. MAIA started as the result of a long-term effort to document and preserve the modern artistic works from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, most of which were lost and damaged in the fires and looting during the aftermath of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. As the site shows, very little is known about many of the works, including their current whereabouts and their original location in the Museum. The lack of documents about modern Iraqi art prompted the growth of the project to include supporting text. The site makes the works of art available as an open access database in order to raise public awareness of the many lost works and to encourage interested individuals to participate in helping to document the museum’s original and/or lost holdings.
The MAIA site is the culmination of seven years of work by Project Director Nada Shabout, a professor of Art History and the Director of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Institute (CAMCSI, http://www.art.unt.edu/camcsi.html) at the University of North Texas. Since 2003, Shabout has been collecting any and all information on the lost works through intensive research, interviews with artists, museum personnel, and art gallery owners. Shabout received two fellowships from the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII, http://www.taarii.org/) in 2006 and 2007 to conduct the first phase of data collection. In 2009, she teamed with colleagues at the Alexandria Archive Institute (http://alexandriaarchive.org), a California-based non-profit organization dedicated to opening up global cultural heritage for research, education, and creative works. The team won a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (http://neh.gov) to create an open, comprehensive virtual archive of the works that were once housed in Museum’s various galleries. These significant national treasures are displayed in an open format that invites worldwide use, including the Iraqi national and expatriate communities, and users are encouraged to help identify and further document individual pieces.
The aim of MAIA is to map out the modern art’s development in Iraq during the twentieth century and be a research tool to scholars, students, authorities, and the general public, as well as raise awareness of the rich modern heritage of Iraq. Furthermore, the creation of an authoritative and public inventory of the collection will not only act as a reminder of their cultural value and thus hopefully hasten their return, but will help combat smuggling and black market dealings of the works.