Professor of History of Art and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities Lisa Saltzman has been appointed the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. The appointment will begin in January 2018.
The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. It houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art as well as conferences, colloquia, and workshops for scholars from around the world. As the Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program, Saltzman will lead the program’s international agenda of intellectual events and collaborations and will oversee the Clark’s residential Fellows program.
A longstanding and valued member of the Bryn Mawr community, Saltzman has excelled in scholarship, teaching, and service.
She is the author of numerous books, including Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Saltzman was granted the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, a year in which she alone received that award in the category of “Fine Arts Research.” She has also received fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service or DAAD), the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and the Clark Institute, where she spent a year on a fellowship jointly hosted by the Clark and the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Williams College. She serves as a member of the advisory board for The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, and is a member of the advisory committee for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Harvard.
“Lisa’s exceptional level of scholarship and her passion for the history of art have enriched Bryn Mawr immeasurably,” says President Kim Cassidy. “She has helped to build world-class undergraduate and graduate programs at Bryn Mawr, and we are proud that she is now honored with leadership of one of the foremost centers of art historical studies. While we will miss her personally on our campus, we are grateful that we will continue to see her legacy in the programs and people she has inspired here.”
Saltzman has served on the Bryn Mawr faculty for 23 years, teaching a wide variety of courses and mentoring numerous undergraduate and graduate students. She has also served as chair of the History of Art Department and, for seven years, led the Center for Visual Culture lecture series, which brings internationally known artists, critics, and historians to Bryn Mawr College.