Molly Emma Aitken
Associate Professor
Art History
212.650.7413
CG-109B
maitken@ccny.cuny.edu
Molly Emma Aitken is a specialist in Asian art history, in particular the arts of South Asia. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2001 with a concentration on the art of South Asia. She has curated traveling exhibitions on South Asian jewelry and contemporary folk quilts, and has published numerous articles on Mughal and Rajput painting. Aitken received CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey book award in 2011 and the AAS Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012 for her book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Currently focused on the late 16th and early 17th centuries, she is looking at Mughal receptions of Rajput court arts in the context of social pleasure.
Joshua I. Cohen
Assistant Professor
Art History
212.650.6923
CG-M258A
jcohen2@ccny.cuny.edu
Joshua I. Cohen (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2014) is an art historian specializing in 20th-century Francophone West Africa, Southern Africa, and connections to Europe and the US. His writing has appeared in The Art Bulletin, African Arts, The Journal of Black Studies, and The Burlington Magazine. He teaches courses in African and global modernisms; the Harlem Renaissance; histories of portraiture; and postcolonialism and contemporary art. He also regularly teaches Art 10000, Introduction to the Visual Arts of the World.
Ellen Handy
Associate Professor
Art History
212.650.7431
SH-303C
ehandy@ccny.cuny.edu
Ellen Handy is a historian, curator and critic of photography and modern art. She teachers courses in the history of photography, art of the United States, art criticism, and research methods in art history. Previously, she was Executive Curator of Visual Collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a regular columnist for Arts Magazine. She received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, and her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University. Her research interest include landscape and urban imagery in photography and other mediums, intersections of art and science in 19th century photography, women and photography, connoisseurship in photography, printed ephemera, and early modernism in visual and literary culture in the United States.
Anna Indych-López
Professor
Art History
212.650.5163
CG-251
aindych@ccny.cuny.edu
Anna Indych-López specializes in the modern art of Latin America, specifically Mexico. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2003. Her work focuses on exhibition culture, cross-cultural perceptions, reception analysis, and the relationship between art and politics. A frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues on Modern Mexican and Latin American art, she has also published on contemporary Latino/a artists. She received the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for her book Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927-1940 published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2009 and is co-author (with Leah Dickerman) of Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art published by MoMA in 2011.
Abby Kornfeld
Assistant Professor
Art History
212.650.7413
CG-109B
akornfeld@ccny.cuny.edu
Abby Kornfeld specializes in medieval art and architecture. She holds a joint appointment with the program of Jewish Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in 2013. Her work focuses on the intersections between Jewish, Christian, and Islamic art across the medieval Mediterranean. Her forthcoming book resituates three Hebrew illuminated manuscripts within the broader context of medieval art in late fourteenth century Spain. Her research has won the support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Wexner Foundation. In addition, she curated an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles on the eventful and often tumultuous lives of medieval manuscripts after the rise of the printing presses.
Craig Houser
Lecturer, Director of the MA in Art History and the Art Museum Studies Concentration
Art History and Museum Studies
212.650.5963
CG-244
chouser@ccny.cuny.edu
Craig Houser has a B.A. in art history from Carleton College, an M.A. from Hunter College, and a Ph.D. from the CUNY Grad Center. His scholarship focuses on modern and contemporary art in relationship to issues related to gender and sexuality, as well as institutional and social politics. He also has substantial experience working in museums as a curator and educator. He was a curatorial fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and an assistant curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In addition, he was also an editor for College Art Association, which publishes The Art Bulletin and Art Journal. Houser’s publications include “Rachel Whiteread: Vienna Holocaust Memorial,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (University of California Press) and “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing: A History of CAA’s Publications,” in The Eye, the Hand, the Mind: The College Art Association and the Visual Arts since 1911 (Rutgers University Press). Houser has also published articles win Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and the Journal of Curatorial Studies.
Lise Kjaer
Lecturer
Art History
212.650.7429
CG-230
lkjaer@ccny.cuny.edu
Lise Kjaer received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2008. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in twentieth century and contemporary art, art history survey and MFA seminars. Her area of research includes issues of identity in modern and contemporary art, and global art history. Kjaer’s dissertation Awakening the Spiritual: James Turrell and Quakerism considered the artist’s light installations in view of his renewed interest in Quakerism, Quaker tenets, history and tradition. Current research involves an anthology (co-edited with Dr. Will Wroth) on the scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s influence on twentieth century art, tracing the impact of the writer and curator’s publications, exhibitions and scholarly involvement with South Asian art on twentieth century American, Asian and European art and art history. Kjaer has previously received an MFA with Distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland in 1992. She has exhibited internationally in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland and the United States, and been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Bamse Kragh-Jacobsen’s Award, and been a fellow of NIFCA, a Nordic artist in residency program in Helsinki, Finland; The Danish Art Council’s Residency at Hirsholmen; TSKW, The Studios of Key West; The Danish Visual Artists’ Berlin Residency Program; and Jeckels Hotel AiR, Denmark. Along with her scholarly work in art history, Kjaer continues her art practice exhibiting sculptures and installation pieces that are often time-based, ephemeral and participatory inviting the viewer to become a part of the work.