Mónica Domínguez Torres

Mónica Domínguez Torres’ book, Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion, was selected as one of the five finalists for 2025 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association, and it received honorable mention for the 2025 Eleanor Tufts book award from The Society for Iberian Global Art. At less than a year from being released, it has been very positively reviewed in two different journals Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme and Winterthur Portfolio. Pearls for the Crown centers on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry and demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today.

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Jason Hill

In 2024, Associate Professor Jason Hill was very fortunate to be able to continue work on his current book on photography and police media in the United States while in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and then at the Center for the Advanced Study for the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. 

While at the Getty, he completed the forthcoming publication “Metropolitan Division: Ken Gonzales-Day between the Getty Museum and the LAPD,” which will appear in fall 2025 in the volume Ken Gonzales-Day: “Nevermade,” edited by Amelia Jones for Reaktion Press. This essay considers the inclusion of Gonzales-Day’s photographs of portrait busts from the Getty Museum collections in a 2015 public art commission for the exterior of the Metro Division Police Station in Central Los Angeles. 

Hill also completed his long-gestating essay “Paper Routes,” forthcoming in 2025, for the volume Print Matters: Photography Across Media in Illustrated Magazines, co-edited by Maria Antonelli Pelizzari and Andrés Mario Zervigon for Getty Research Institute Publications. This essay tracks the tangled supporting roles of urban roadways and newsstand vendors in the gathering and distribution of newspaper photographs in New York City in the 1940s. 

Hill presented a lecture, “Incessant Listening: The Representational Infrastructure of the Police Radio Antenna Tower,” at the National Gallery of Art in April 2025.

Jessica L. Horton

University of Delaware Associate Professor Jessica L. Horton’s book, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War was published by Duke University Press in August 2024. The Department of Art History professor examines how Native American artists in the mid-20th century mobilized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth at the center of international relations. Their art modeled a radical alternative to dominant forms of statecraft, an approach that Horton terms “earth diplomacy”: a creative response to extractive colonial capitalism that is grounded in Native ideas of deep reciprocal relationships between humans and other beings that govern the world. 

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Ikem Okoye

In July 2024, Professor Ikem Okoye was the keynote speaker at a six-day conference on "Ongoing and Emerging Practices in African Architectural Discourses." The event was hosted at the School of Architecture and Planning of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, which was also celebrating its centennial since its founding. It was organized in collaboration with the global grouping called the African Architecture and Urban History Network, and with support from the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London.

In September, Okoye presented a paper titled "Raiding Queen Victoria's Estate: Two Blacksmiths at the Empire Exhibition" at a conference on the 1924–1925 British Commonwealth Exhibition that was held on the grounds of what is now the Wembley Stadium and its surrounds. The conference convened at the Victoria and Albert Museum and was co-organized with the London School of Architecture. 

In November, he delivered a keynote address, "De-Sign: Contemporary Design: Some Futures in Unexpected Places," for the 2024 iteration of the annual DEsign Symposium held at The Delaware Contemporary.

On December 6, Okoye attended the 18th DOCOMOMO Conference, Santiago de Chile. Docomomo is the acronym for the conservation- and preservation-focused International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement. Okoye’s paper "Modern Architecture and Ornament?" was read. It will be published in the Conference Proceedings, out in 2026, together with his original photographs of the examples illustrated in the paper — from Brazil, Nigeria and the Caribbean.

Lauren H. Petersen

Professor Lauren H. Petersen, with her long-time collaborator, Sandra R. Joshel, recently published an article on a unique Roman fresco from a fullery (laundry facility) at Pompeii with the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, “We Sing of Fullers and Owls: A Pompeian Fresco and Its Entanglements." Also published last year is a chapter, “On Valuing Roman Art and the Labour of Art Making,” in Valuing Labour in Greco-Roman Antiquity,  eds. Miko Flohr and Kim Bowes (Brill, 2024), which explores ideas she presented as part of a key-note address for the conference Valuing Labor in Antiquity (Penn – Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values XI, 2021). 

Petersen traveled to Italy last fall as an invited speaker for the conference Symposium Vesuvianum, Labor Invisus: The World of Work, at Villa Vergiliana (Cuma, Italy), where she delved into her long-standing interest in Roman slavery with a talk, “The Labor of Women in the Production of Roman Luxury.” Recently elected to the Classical Association of the Atlantic States leadership, Petersen begins her cursus honorum this year, serving as the second vice president.

Alison Terndrup

The University of Delaware's Faculty Senate presented a prestigious 2025 award for Excellence in Teaching to Visiting Assistant Professor Alison Terndrup. A brick bearing Terndrup's name will be placed in Mentors’ Circle adjacent to Memorial Hall. Recognizing that students follow different paths through their course material and absorb information in diverse ways, Terndrup makes her classes brim with opportunities to learn visually, textually and through lectures, discussions and role-playing debates. Terndrup has also been experimenting with the responsible integration of AI in the classroom and was interviewed about it in the University of Delaware Magazine, UDaily, and ON: Cultivating Student Engagement in Higher Ed Podcast. 

REad "Alison Terndrup Wins Teaching Award"

Jennifer Van Horn

Professor Jennifer Van Horn continues as president of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) and had a think piece published from the last conference: "Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead From HECAA@30," entitled "Provocations from HECAA@30," in October 2024. 

She also published an essay in the exhibition catalogue  Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit for Independence. As chair of the University of Delaware Antiracism Initiative Campus Tour Committee, she celebrated the publication of the Black Histories at UD StoryMap, a student-authored digital public history project. Read the UDaily story to learn more about the project.

She held a virtual author workshop for the volume she is co-editing with Jaipreet Virdi from the Department of History titled The Disabled Gaze: Material and Visual Perspectives. She celebrated two Ph.D. students who successfully defended their dissertations: Emelie Gevalt and Michael Hartman. 

Van Horn joined Laurel Dean, History Department, University of Notre Dame, to teach a summer 2024 seminar "Disability Histories in the Visual Archive: Redress, Protest, and Justice" held June 9–14, 2024, at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) and sponsored by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture. The seminar focused on the visual and material cultures of disability in 18th- and 19th-century North America. 

Participants honed their skills in visual and material culture analysis, learned key methods and theories, including cripping, and gained experience working closely with archives and visual materials that support disability history. The group explored the unparalleled collections of the AAS, especially the library’s exemplary graphic arts collection of prints, photographs and ephemera, as well as collections materials on related topics such as education and printing for the blind. Participants actively worked toward disability justice by attending to understudied and obscured histories, by questioning how we can use visual and material things to redress past injustices and dismantle ableism, and by considering equitable archival access.