FACULTY

Alexis Boylan - Assistant Professor
Office: A+A 412
Telephone: 865.974.9390
Email: aboylan@utk.edu
Education: Rutgers University - Ph.D.

“While the typical inquiry, 'What is American about American art?' has been tossed aside by many scholars, in light of recent events and ease with which many ideas get termed 'American' or 'Un-American' I believe the question takes on a new and more urgent meaning. In my scholarly work and in the classroom I seek to explore the power of visual culture in shaping understandings of gender, race, and nationality. The questions I ask are: What values are emphasized in a work of art? What myths repeated? And what ideas, people, and places are obscured?."

Alexis Boylan teaches 19th and 20th century American art. She earned her BA at Bryn Mawr College and her MA and Ph.D at Rutgers University. She is particularly interested in the presentation and performance of masculinity in turn-of-the-century American paintings and sculpture. She is currently working on a book entitled, "Man on the Street: The Urban Man in the Art of the Ashcan School." Boylan is also editing a collection of essays, under contract with Duke University Press which considers the art of Thomas Kinkade and his impact on contemporary art. She was awarded a Chester Dale Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the fall of 2004 and in the spring of 2005 curated her first show “Guys and Dolls: Gender and American Art” at the Wriston Art Center, Appleton, Wisconsin.

Bill Dewey - Associate Professor
Office: A+A 454
Telephone: 865.974.0651
Email: wdewey@utk.edu
Education: Indiana University - Ph.D.

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"I am especially interested in the arts of eastern and southern Africa. These arts have often been dismissed as being merely decorative and utilitarian but are now proving to be as rich in form and full of meaning as the African masks and figures that have long been favored by Western audiences. My work emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, and one of my principle goals is to collaborate with African scholars. I strongly feel that organizing exhibitions is one of the best ways to share the brilliance of African expressive culture with a broader audience. To that end I organized the exhibition, The Earth Moves — We Follow: Celebrating African Art for the McClung Museum here at the University of Tennessee (2003) and Africa Celebrates the Art of Living for the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art (2005)."

Bill Dewey received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in African Art History. He wrote his dissertation on the traditional art of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. He has served as curator of several major exhibitions, including Sleeping Beauties: The Jerome L. Joss Collection of Headrests at UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History (1994), Legacies of Stone, Zimbabwe: Past and Present at the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium (1998), The World Moves, We Follow: Celebrating African Art at the Frank H. McClung Museum of the University of Tennessee (2003), Africa Celebrates the Art of Living at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (2006), and he was co-curator with Edizon Leon for the El Color De La Diaspora: Fotografias both at the University of Tennessee and La Universidad Simón Bolívar (2006). His publications include the catalogues for these exhibitions and a chapter entitled "Forging Memory," in the College Art Association's award winning catalogue MEMORY: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996). His interest in African iron art led to an exhibition and catalogue entitled Iron, Master of them All (1993); the video, Weapons for the Ancestors (1992); an article entitled "AK-47s for the Ancestors," that appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Religion in Africa (1994) and a chapter, "Iron Sculpting in Africa" for the Museum of African Art's Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa (2003). He served as President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association of America (1995-97), the largest international organization of art historians, anthropologists and museum professionals studying the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora.

"I am drawn to the study of urban architecture because it breeds a certain tension between the city itself as a built environment and the individual buildings that define the built environment. In fact, scholarly study of a city is not unlike the physical experience of the city. Both enterprises call for a bifocal approach predicated on an appreciation of the city as a monument and architecture as the medium of its creation. Urban architectural “bites” are relatively small, but their accumulation takes on a form and content the exact nature of which is complex beyond that of any one unit. In my work I try to recover the original relationship between a building, or any work of art, and its larger environment in an effort to reclaim something of its original magic."

Dorothy Metzger Habel is a scholar of seventeenth-century Italian art whose research focuses on the architecture and city planning of papal Rome. Her recent book The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII (Cambridge University Press, 2002) examines the role of discrete zones within the city, including the Quirinal, Piazza del Popolo, Piazza S. Marco, Piazza Colonna, via del Corso and Piazza S. Pietro, in establishing Pope Alexander VII’s new conceptualization of the city as one reviving the architectural formulae of late-antique Roman Asia. In addition, she has published studies on the architecture and sculpture of Bernini, the architecture of Pietro da Cortona and the architectural history of Piazza S. Ignazio, Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She received her M. A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan.

Tim Hiles - Associate Professor
Office: A+A 250
Telephone: 974.2725
Email: thiles@utk.edu
Education: Pennsylvania State University - Ph.D.

"I have always been intrigued by the ability of the avant-garde to move society forward. This aspect of art and its interdisciplinary nature form the basis of my research. The cultural centers of Vienna and Munich in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the avant-garde clashed with a glorious tradition, have been the focus of my explorations."

Timothy W. Hiles received his Ph.D. from Penn State University where his studies emphasized the early modern movement in Central Europe. Among his publications are Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (1996) and “Klimt, Nietzsche and the Beethoven Frieze,” which appeared in the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts (1998). Dr. Hiles’ research emphasizes the role of an interdisciplinary approach in the study of the avant-garde. His interest in using technology in the classroom led to his creation of one of the earliest comprehensive art history web sites in the country and to the publication “Web-Site Enhancement of Traditional Classroom Pedagogy” (1999).

Amy Neff - Associate Professor
Office: A+A 414
Telephone: 865.974.8351
Email: aneff@utk.edu
Education: University of Pennsylvania - Ph.D.

"My work explores the role of images in visualizing and promoting certain attitudes and ideologies in western culture. My focus on the thirteenth century reflects an interest in a transitional period, when changing systems of thought, including the Franciscan movement, encouraged a new naturalism and humanism in the arts. I am especially interested in art associated with the Franciscans and in images concerned with women's roles."

A specialist in medieval art, Amy Neff received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her thesis studied the artistic interaction between two medieval cultures, Italy and Byzantium. Recent publications have focused on the impact of the Franciscan movement on the arts and on the imagery of women. These include “The Pain of Compassion: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” in The Art Bulletin (1998), and “Palma dabit palmam: A Franciscan Program of Devotion,” in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (2002), and "Lesser Brothers: Franciscan Mission and Identity at Assisi," Art Bulletin (2006). She was aslo a contributor to the catalogue of Byzantium: Faith and Power, 1261-1557, a major exhibition that opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in March 2004. Dr. Neff’s awards include the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Studies of the National Gallery of Art, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"My research interests circulate about issues of visual literacy, interchanges between artistic media, text-image relationships, and the role of material culture in social positioning. Currently, I am expanding my study of the epistolary culture of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, including publications of letters and letter-writing manuals, designs for letter papers and, epistolary imagery in woodblock-printed novel illustrations. Other current research projects focus on woodblock-printed playing cards for drinking games, Hu Zhengyan and the Ten Bamboo Studio, and the influence of print culture and letters on image-text relationships in the late imperial period."

Suzanne Wright received her M. A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University where she wrote a dissertation on “Cultural Literacy and Social Identity in Woodblock-printed Letter Papers of the Late Ming Dynasty.” Her article “Luoxuan biangu jianpu and Shizhuzhai jianpu: Two Late-Ming Catalogues of Letter Paper Designs” appeared in Artibus Asiae in 2004. Prior to pursuing the doctorate, she was Assistant Curator of Far Eastern Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her area of specialization is the visual culture of seventeenth-century China.