Emeriti
Wayne Craven
waynec@udel.edu
Professor Craven received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Indiana University, and was awarded a doctorate from Columbia University. During his long teaching career at the University he held the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Chair of Art History. He was the recipient of the distinguished Francis Allison Faculty Award and served as Chair of the Delaware State Arts Council. In 1995, he was elected to the prestigious College of Fellows of the Philadelphia Athenaeum. In 2008, the University conferred upon him an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree. A noted authority in American nineteenth-century art, Dr. Craven was among the pioneer scholars of his generation to establish the field of American Art as a legitimate subject of scholarly investigation. His teaching and many books and articles contributed in making the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware one of the prime national centers for the study of American art and culture. Among his publications, Sculpture in America (1968), which grew out of an exhibition of American sculpture curated by Dr. Craven at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, is the most thorough survey of American sculpture to date and is extensively used as a textbook on the subject. His American Art: History and Culture (1994) has become a classroom standard. His other books include Colonial Portraiture in America (1987); Stanford White: Decorator in Opulence and Dealer in Antiquities (2005); and Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society (2008).
John Stephens Crawford
jstephen@udel.edu
Professor Crawford received his B.A. from Michigan State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is a classical archaeologist, trained in Minoan, Mycenaean, Greek, and Roman art. He has studied early Byzantine art, as well. He has excavated at two sites in Turkey--Sardis and Aphrodisias--and has travelled extensively in Europe and the Mediterranean countries, three times with fifteen University of Delaware undergraduates.
Professor Crawford has published works about his finds at Sardis in Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times and a monograph, The Byzantine Shops at Sardis. His other writings explore the relationships between classical and American sculpture and architecture. Also interested in contemporary art, he has written on the painters Julio da Cunha and David Hornung, as well as current exhibitions. Together with his students, Crawford organized an exhibition at the University Gallery and published a catalogue titled Ancient Art at the University of Delaware. He and his students are researching the works of ancient art bequeathed to the University by G. M. A. Hanfmann of Harvard. His most recent publications concern Jewish/Christian relations at Sardis based on objects found there. He has sponsored four Honors Program Undergraduate Research Fellows and won a University of Delaware Excellence in Teaching Award in 1985.
Ann E. Gibson
agibson@udel.edu
Ann Eden Gibson writes on Modern and Contemporary Art and is best known for her work on Abstract Expressionism. She holds an M.A. in Ceramics from Kent State University and taught studio art for ten years before beginning her M.A. in Art History at the University of Pittsburgh, where she received the Distinguished Alumna Award for 1995. She received her Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Delaware and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and UCLA, and has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Studies in the Visual Art at the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, and the Getty Research Institute.
Interested in the interaction of vision and language in the production of culture and identity, Gibson meshes ideas from fields such as literature, psychology, anthropology and philosophy with close examination popular culture as well as works of art to look at how art affects culture and how culture is reflected in art. She specializes in art after World War II, teaching courses in Semiotics, Abstraction, Allegory, Cross-Cultural Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, Feminist Theory and Contemporary Women's Art, and Postmodernism.
Gibson is the author of Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (1990) and Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997). She co-curated Judith Godwin, Style and Grace for the Museum of West Virginia (1997) and Norman Lewis: The Black Paintings, 1946-1977, at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1998). She has written catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the New Jersey State Museum, the Corcoran, Kenkeleba Gallery and the New Museum, and The Kunstmuseum Basel. With Stephen Polcari she guest-edited an issue of the Art Journal, and her articles have appeared in journals such as Studio International, Kunstforum, The International Review of African American Art, Artforum, American Art, Genders, The Journal of Homosexuality, Yale Journal of Criticism, Arts Magazine, Third Text, and anthologies published by the University of Chicago, Cambridge University Press, Harper Collins, and the University of Liverpool Press.
Bernard L. Herman
bherman@udel.edu
Professor Herman, Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History, earned his B.A. in English Literature from the College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. His field is American material culture, with specializations in American vernacular architecture, folk and ethnic arts, and historic preservation. His books include Everyday Architecture of The Mid-Atlantic (1997), The Stolen House (1992), A Land and Life Remembered: Americo-Liberian Folk Architecture (1989) with Svend Holsoe and Max Belcher, and Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 1700-1900 (1987). Professor Herman is co-founder of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and co-edited volumes III and IV of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture. His forthcoming book Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830 will appear in 2004. Currently Dr. Herman is developing a collection of essays on the critical relationships between objects, images and narratives with a particular emphasis on contemporary quilts. Dr. Herman serves as Director of the Center for American Material Culture Studies and as a Senior Research Fellow in the University's Center for Historic Architecture and Design, an interdisciplinary research center supporting public service and student research in historic preservation. Professor Herman, who also serves on the faculty of the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, Department of History, and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, strives to integrate teaching, research, and public service in the study, interpretation, and preservation of American traditional arts and architecture. His courses include research and reading seminars on vernacular architecture, folk and ethnic arts, historic landscapes, material culture theory, and early American urbanism. Professor Herman received the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1992, and he is a two-time winner of the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award for the best published work in North American vernacular architecture. He has also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study and Research.
Damie Stillman
stillman@udel.edu
Professor Stillman received his B.S. at Northwestern University, then earned an M.A. from the University of Delaware/Winterthur Program and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He teaches courses in English and American architecture and decorative arts, and his teaching involves a combination of the analysis of stylistic qualities of individual works with investigation of their social, cultural, and historical context to create a synthesis. Modern architecture is another of his interests, ranging from the Neo-classical of the late eighteenth century to Postmodernism in the late twentieth. Winner of the Founders Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, he has held two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as a variety of other grants. His books include English Painting: The Great Masters, 1730-1860; The Decorative Work of Robert Adam; and a two-volume study, English Neo-classical Architecture, which appeared in 1988 and won the Gottschalk Prize for that year. Professor Stillman curated an exhibition on Architecture & Ornament in Late 19th-Century America at the University Gallery, is Editor-in-Chief of the Buildings of the United States series, and is currently at work on a study of Neo-classical architecture in America during the Federal Period.
