Category: Art History
Art history faculty lead national research initiatives
March 27, 2026 Written by Department of Art History Staff
Department faculty fuel progress through scholarship and service
The University of Delaware Department of Art History faculty celebrate a year of achievement and institutional leadership. Their accomplishments uphold the department’s commitment to the interpretation and analysis of art across cultures and historical periods.
Wendy Bellion completes appointment as associate dean
Wendy Bellion completed her appointment as associate dean for the humanities in August 2025 and is currently on sabbatical, focusing on new research projects. As AD, she had the pleasure of steering UD’s inaugural celebrations of National Arts & Humanities Month, building faculty resources and collaborating with college leadership on strategic initiatives. This year, she is developing a monograph about the women of the Peale family as well as two co-edited publications: a special issue on Atlantic revolutions for Journal18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, aligned with the 2026 semi quincentennial; and a volume of essays (with UD art history professors Monica Dominguez Torres and Jennifer Van Horn) on iconoclasm across the Americas, 1500–1900, that grows out of an April 2025 scholarly convening funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Bellion was honored to represent UD faculty at the inauguration of the University’s 29th president, Laura Carlson, on April 17, 2026, where she read Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of Morning.”
Mónica Domínguez Torres organizes conference panels and events
Mónica Domínguez Torres has been busy organizing several conference panels and events. In March 2025, she served as chair, co-organizer and respondent of the panel Environmental Forms in Early Modern Emblematic Culture and chair of the panel Ecocriticism & Art-Historical Methods in Conversation II, and both at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference, Boston, Mass. In April, she co-organized along with Wendy Bellion and Jennifer Van Horn a scholarly convening on iconoclasm across the Americas, 1500–1900, at the Delaware Art Museum and University of Delaware, with the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art. She was also selected to participate in the Presidential Academic Leadership Program, a new initiative designed to equip them with the foundational knowledge, tools and perspective shifts needed to navigate leadership roles in higher education.
Jason Hill completes National Gallery of Art Fellowship
Jason Hill spent the 2024–25 academic year as the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, where he conducted foundational research for his upcoming book on the historical convergence of mass media and law enforcement. In residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Hill examined how the simultaneous rise of modern press photography and police radio systems between the 1920s and 1950s helped "conjure" the criminalized subjects of the American 20th century.
Ikem Stanley Okoye champions global architectural research
Ikem Stanley Okoye began his summer at a research seminar on environmental and social justice at Birkbeck College. Organized by University College London, the event launched "Cohabitations," an initiative supporting young scholars developing manuscripts on subjects or styles often overlooked by mainstream American publishers. Okoye collaborated with colleagues from Barnard College, the University of Eindhoven and the Rhode Island School of Design to explore how "cohabitation" addresses the current political climates in the United States and Europe.
In October, Okoye traveled to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the 50th anniversary of the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture program. He presented “Re-Geographing Modernism” as part of a symposium on modernism’s global distribution. While at MIT, he met fellow art historian and UD alumna Kristal Smentek. Earlier in the fall, Okoye also served as an architecture studio critic for graduate thesis projects at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, focusing on urban sustainability in Africa and Asia.
Okoye’s recent scholarship and curatorial work include:
- New Publication: His essay, “Tesserae and Sovereignty at Risk: Yusuf Grillo’s Mural at the Lagos City Hall,” was published in the anthology Ornamentation in African Tropical Architecture(AA Publications).
- London Design Biennale: Okoye served as a consultant for the Nigerian Pavilion. Curated by Myles Igwebuike, the exhibition featured Okoye’s research into medieval Igbo metalworking cultures in Lejja, Nigeria.
- MoMA Exhibition: Following his appointment as guest co-curator for the Museum of Modern Art’s upcoming exhibition on West African modern architecture, Okoye and Chief Curator Martino Stierli were awarded a major grant from the Graham Foundation to support the project.
Alison Terndrup publishes Image of the Modern Ottoman Sultan
Alison Terndrup, visiting assistant professor of art history, has publishedImage of the Modern Ottoman Sultan< (Brill, 2025), which investigates the relationship between ideas of modernisation of the Ottoman Empire and the image of the sultan. Terndrup situates the imperial portrait within the wider program of top-down modernization movements initiated at the end of the 18th century under Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and culminating in the Tanẓīmāt (Reorganization) era (1839–76). Her study breaks new ground by considering the use of new image-making technologies and aesthetic trends—including oil-on-canvas paintings, lithographic prints and photographs—primarily at the imperial court in Istanbul, but also at the provincial courts of the Ottoman Balkans.
Emeritus Faculty News
Lawrence Nees publishes two books
Since 2020, Professor Emeritus Lawrence Nees (at UD art history 1978–2023) has published two books: Frankish Manuscripts. The Seventh to the Tenth Century, Manuscripts Illuminated in France I (2 vols.; London: Harvey Miller Ltd. and Turnhout: Brepols, 2022) and Illuminating the Word in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography and Codicology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
His most recent book, Charlemagne’s Phantom Rider and Walahfrid Strabo’s De imagine Tetrici. Idols, Poetry and Politics at the Court of Louis the Pious, has been submitted for publication and is currently being reviewed.
Nees has published several articles: “The European Context of Manuscript Illumination in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 600–900,” in Manuscripts in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, edited by Claire Breay and Joanna Story (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2021), pp. 45–65; “A Copper-Alloy Plate with Architectural Imagery in Berlin … and Jerusalem?” in The Making of Islamic Art [Festschrift in Honor of Sheila Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom], edited by Carole Hillenbrand and Robert Hillenbrand, Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. 156–183; “Antique and faux-Antique in Carolingian Manuscripts,” in Tributes to Richard K. Emmerson. Crossing Medieval Disciplines, edited by Deirdre Carter, Elina Gertsman, and Karlyn Griffith (London: Harvey Miller and Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), pp. 19–39; “Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America: Rosemary Cramp,” (with Celia Chazelle, Deborah Deliyannis, and Jane Hawkes), Speculum 99 (2024), 1019–1021; “Word and Image in Madalberta’s Tabernacle Miniature,” Gesta 64 (2025), 45–69. Four articles are in press.
Nees still misses teaching and meeting with students and colleagues in Newark but has kept in touch with many former students. Many of these students did him great honor by producing a Festschrift publication: Illuminating a Legacy. Essays in Honor of Lawrence Nees, edited by Lynley Ann Herbert, Isabelle Lachat and Stephen M. Wagner (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2024).
