10:30 -10:40    Introductory remarks (Itohan Osayimwese and Gretel Rodríguez) 

10:40 - 11:20    Mary Miller (Yale/Getty Research Institute)

11:20 - 12:00    Milette Gaifman (Yale University)

12:00 - 12:30    Q&A

12:30 - 2:00     Lunch

2:00 - 2:40    John Clarke (UT Austin)

2:40 - 3:20    Claire Bosc-Tiessé (The Clark/CNRS)

3:20 - 3:40    Q&A

3:40 - 4:00    Coffee break

4:00 - 5:00    Round Table Discussion with guest speakers and Brown Faculty 
               (Sheila Bonde, Jeffrey Moser, Douglas Nickel, Gretel Rodríguez, Amy Russell)

5:00 - 6:00     Reception 

• John R. Clarke (University of Texas at Austin)
  • Clarke is the Annie Laurie Howard Regents Professor of Fine Arts, teaching in the Department of Art and Art History. His teaching, research, and publications focus on ancient Roman art, art-historical methodology, and contemporary art. Clarke has ten books, and 128 essays, articles, and reviews to his credit. Currently, Clarke is co-director of the Oplontis Project, working, since 2005, to complete the study, excavation, and publication of two Roman villas (“A” and “B”) buried by Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
• Claire Bosc-Tiessé (Clark Art Institute)
  • Bosc-Tiessé is a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. Her research interests pertain to creation in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia from the thirteenth century onwards. She has published Les Îles de la mémoire: Fabrique des images et écriture de l'histoire dans les églises du lac Tana, Éthiopie, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle; Peintures sacrées d’Éthiopie: Collection de la mission Dakar-Djibouti with A. Wion, and Lalibela: Site rupestre chrétien d'Éthiopie with M.-L. Derat. More broadly, her work addresses the modalities of writing a history of the arts in Africa before the twentieth century and the issues at stake.
• Milette Gaifman (Yale University)
  • Gaifman is a scholar of ancient art and archaeology, focusing primarily on Greek art of the Archaic and Classical periods. Her research interests include the interaction between visual culture and religion, the variety of forms in the arts of antiquity (from the naturalistic to the non-figural), the interactive traits of various artistic media, and the reception of Greek art in later periods. Her current book project is the revised and expanded version of the Louise Smith Bross Lectures that she delivered at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in May 2018. The forthcoming volume titled Classification and the History of Greek Art and Architecture examines how classifications and taxonomies shape our understanding of Greek art and architecture in the modern era.
• Mary Miller (Getty Research Institute)
  • Miller is the Director of the Getty Research Institute as well as Sterling Professor Emeritus of History of Art and former dean of Yale College. A specialist of the art of the ancient New World, Miller is currently focusing her work on the Maya city of Chichen Itza, Yucatán, Maya figurines, and the history of the market in pre-Hispanic art, particularly in California. For her work on the art of ancient Mexico and the Maya, Miller has won national recognition including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Howard Lamar Prize of the Association of Yale Alumni for outstanding service by a faculty member.  In April and May 2010, she delivered the A W Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, and she delivered the Slade Lectures at Cambridge University during the academic year 2014–2015. 

• “The Future of the Past…Is the Past” Mary Miller
  • Scholars, collectors, and others have long been interested in the destruction and collection of pre-Hispanic works in the wake of the Spanish Invasion of the Americas, from the melting of sacred objects to the discarding of others, from the burning of works considered idolatrous to the acquisition of others by elite Europeans.  For more recent times, and despite widespread condemnation of the practices around the looting of the pre-Hispanic past, details are rarely understood, and indeed, often intentionally obscured. Surreptitious removal from the ground, illicit shipping across international borders, and quiet sales have effaced the histories of most of the objects—10s of 1000s of them—in the United States (and elsewhere) today.  Drawing on the archives of the Stendahl Art Galleries at the Getty, this talk will look at the movement and monetization of the pre-Hispanic past. Understanding the commerce of the 20th century will be shown to be central to the study of deeper human histories today.
• “Ethiopia vs. Africa: epistemological ecumenes from an art historical perspective” Claire Bosc-Tiessé
  • This presentation will examine the different ecumenes to which Ethiopia on the one hand, and Africa on the other, belong, depending on the period, from the point of view of art history. Starting from the case of Christian Ethiopia, at the margins as well as at the crossroads of different geo-chrono-cultural and epistemological worlds - “the East”, “Byzantium” and “Africa” but not exclusively - we will highlight how these sometimes overlapping entities have been defined both scientifically and politically over the long term. Starting from what is still often thought of as the “other” of Africa, we will confront the biases and ruts of different historiographies, see how Africa has been constructed as an epistemological continent, and what this implies for the way we think about the relationship to time, the place of the object and definitions of identity.
• “Thoughts on How to Reinvigorate Pre-Modern Art History” John R. Clarke
  • In contrast to standard formal and iconographical studies of ancient art and architecture, art historians have increasingly paired art-historical work on the pre-modern world with the methods of cultural anthropology, comparative ethnography, and archaeology to frame visual representations as indices of processes of acculturation, identity formation, and the social agency of the visual. If pre-modern art history is to retain its relevance in an increasingly multicultural, global framework, it must investigate how pre-modern art and architecture operated in a wider range of polities and geographies than standard studies have considered. Furthermore, art history must embrace embodied approaches that students and laypersons can identify with. Both the professoriate and the museums need to reach a larger public if students are to be attracted to art history as an object of study and as a profession. Although the fundamental techniques of art-historical scholarship have not changed, the means for publishing work have changed. Multi-media exhibitions, digital publication, and new imaging technologies have the potential to revitalize pre-modern art history. I will present a recent interdisciplinary study and exhibition, “New Light from Pompeii,” that represented a great leap forward in research on the archaeology of the senses and the embodied viewer. By offering physical experiences of lighting instruments and their effects, the exhibition opened viewers’ minds to new ways of thinking about how life was lived in a specific premodern culture.
• “The Paradoxical Place of Greek Art in the Modern Discipline of Art History” Milette Gaifman
  • Taking a historiographical approach, the paper considers the paradoxical place that the study of Greek art occupies within the modern discipline of art history. On the one hand, the understanding of the art, architecture, and material culture of the ancient Greeks is deemed foundational to the discipline art history. At the same time, the study of Greek art is often positioned as relatively marginal, and even obsolete. Contrary to any sense of irrelevance the paper argues that in many ways this field of study remains germane to the discipline of art history at large, and offers fertile ground for exploring most current questions such as trans-regional art history or the validity of disciplinary categories.