UMKC

DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY
FACULTY Art History


Marilyn Carbonell, MALS, MA
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Phone: 816-751-1381
MCarbonell@nelson-atkins.org


Robert Cohon, PhD
Associate Research Professor
FA 111, Phone: 816-235-1501
rcohon@nelson-atkins.org

Robert Cohon has published mostly on Roman decorative marble sculpture from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D. His writings also include studies of Augustan propaganda, Roman sarcophagi, and forgeries of antiquities. As a curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, he has created large and small shows on ancient dress, forgeries, and Egyptian mummies. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he teaches ancient and medieval art and specialized courses in Greek and Roman art.


Frances Connelly, PhD
Professor
FA 215, Phone: 816-235-2989
connellyf@umkc.edu

Frances Connelly, professor of art history, specializes in modern European art. She has published two books: The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern Art and Aesthetics (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, reprinted 1998), and Modern Art and the Grotesque (Cambridge University Press, 2003). A third book, The Image at Play: Grotesque Improvisation, Subversion, Revelation, is forthcoming with the University of Washington Press. Dr. Connelly has published numerous article and book chapters on primitivism and on the art theory of John Ruskin and Giambattista Vico. She contributed an essay to a major scholarly catalogue on the Grotesque-Comic in 20th-century German art which accompanied the exhibition in Frankfurt, Munich, and New York City. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, The Smithsonian Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation (at Johns Hopkins), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Missouri Research Board.

Frances Connelly has served as principal graduate adviser and as department chair. She was the author of the Global Art Initiative at UMKC. Active in the Midwest Art History Society, Dr. Connelly is the co-organizer of its 2009 conference in collaboration with the Nelson-Atkins Museum. She teaches the modern art survey and the introductory art history course, and graduate seminars, including Primitivism and its Aftermath, The Grotesque in Modern Art, From the Sublime to the Site-Specific: the Role of Landscape in Modern Art, and Romanticism: Modernism's Other.


Burton L. Dunbar, PhD
Professor
FA 204, Phone: 816-235-2531
dunbarb@umkc.edu

Burton Dunbar received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1972 with research conducted at the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, Brussels, and the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague, 1970-1971.  Currently at UMKC, he is Professor of Art History and Adjunct Professor of Medicine (Medical Humanities).  He has served as chairperson of the Department several times (1978-1983, 1992-1995, and most recently from 2000 through the 2009 academic year).  From 1979 through 1984, he originated the cluster course program in the College funded with two grants he authored from the NEH.  In 1981 he chaired two College wide committees which established the Program for Adult College Education (PACE) and he served as this program’s first director; in 1984 he co-authored a FIPSE grant to revise the PACE curriculum. From 1984 through 1992 he was Associate Dean and Principal Graduate Officer of the College of Arts and Sciences; during this period he served briefly as Acting Dean.  As Associate Dean, he authored a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to implement a series of joint appointments between the Art Department and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.  He coordinated efforts between the College and Kansas State University which led to the cooperative program in architecture between the two campuses. Between 1990 and 1992 he was Faculty Fellow in the Provost’s office. In 1995, he offered the first televised distance education course in the Humanities in the College; a revised version of the Introduction to Art History is still offered through the PACE program. In 1997, he worked with faculty in the College to create the Master of Arts of Liberal Studies program; he served as Faculty Director of this program through the 2009 academic year. 

A popular lecturer in the community, he has given invited lectures at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Hallmark Corporation, and various non-credit courses on campus. Concerning service to the University, he has been a member of the University-wide President’s Inter Faculty Council, a member of the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award Committee, the system-wide Committee on Student Affairs and various university-wide research committees. 

On campus, he has served on the Senate Executive Committee, as a senator from the College, as a member of the Graduate Council, Council on Selection for the School of Medicine, the Chancellor’s Committee on Humanities and Medicine, the University Publications Board, the Research Council, the Chancellor’s Library Advisory Committee, and Advisory Committee for the Office of Student Financial Aid, among others.  He has been elected to most of the standing committees in the College, including the Curriculum Committee, Academic Standards Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Cockefair Chair Program Advisory Committee.  He was appointed to selection committees for the Dean of the School of Education, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and most recently, the search committees for the Chancellor (2005) and Provost (2007). 

The author or co-author of three books, the most recent for the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2005), he is a specialist in Netherlandish Renaissance art and is a member of various professional organizations, including past president of the Midwest Art History Society, membership on the national Board of the Renaissance Society, and former head of the Central Renaissance Society. In addition, he is a  member of the College Art Association. For his research, he has received grants from the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Kress Foundation and publication subventions from the NEA and Getty Foundation. He has served as a consultant to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (1998-2006), to the St. Louis Art Museum (2003), and currently to the Greenlease Museum at Rockhurst University.


Geraldine E. Fowle, PhD
Associate Professor
Principal Undergraduate Advisor - Art History
FA 214, Phone: 816-235-2993
fowleg@umkc.edu

The research interests of Associate Professor Geraldine Fowle are in the 17th century art, the Baroque areas: specifically French 17th-century painting. Dr. Fowle is currently engaged in research on the French artist Sebastien Bourdon. She teaches a wide range of courses at UMKC, including Art 100, Art 302, Environmental Design 250 and 251, and specialized courses in Renaissance/ Baroque Art, Italian Baroque, Northern Baroque, and Spanish Art of the 16th-18th centuries. Dr. Fowle is the undergraduate art history advisor.


Carla Gilliland Poirier, MA
Visual Resources Curator
FA 205A, Phone: 816-235-2994
gillilandc@umkc.edu

The Visual Resources Library is located in the heart of UMKC’s Department of Art and Art History. Under the leadership of Ms. Poirier, a Visual Resources Association member since 1997, the Library's transition to digital is well underway. The collection is comprised of approximately 30,000 digital and 130,000 35mm slide images representing Western art and architecture, ancient through contemporary; the history of photography, printmaking, decorative arts and design, and art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. While the VRL's primary role is in support of the courses taught by our own Studio and Art History faculty, the images are available for use by all UMKC Faculty.


Simon Kelly, PhD
Visiting Associate Professor
Phone: 816-751-1329
skelly@nelson-atkins.org

Simon Kelly has been Associate Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 2005. He was previously Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore and Chester Dale Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He obtained a doctorate in art history from the University of Oxford, where he also taught art history.

Kelly is a specialist in 19th-century French art, and particularly landscape painting, collecting and cultural markets. He is co-author of Untamed: the Art of Antoine-Louis Barye (Walters Art Museum and Prestel, 2006) and has contributed catalogue essays to Renoir Landscapes, 1865-1883 (National Gallery, London and Yale University Press 2007), The Repeating Image: Multiples in French Painting from David to Matisse (Walters Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2007) and In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet (National Gallery of Art, Washington and Yale University Press, 2008).

Kelly has articles in 2009 in Oxford Art Journal, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and The Burlington Magazine.


Maude Southwell Wahlman, PhD
Dorothy and Dale Thompson/MO Endowed Professor of Global Arts
Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program Advisor
FA 207, Phone: 816-235-2986
Web site
wahlmanm@umkc.edu

Maude Southwell Wahlman is the Dorothy and Dale Thompson/Missouri Endowed Professor of Global Arts. She has a BA in Art from Colorado College, a MA in Anthropology from Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale University. Before coming to UMKC, Dr. Wahlman was a Resident Research Fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, and she spent 13 years as a professor of Art History at the University of Central Florida, where she also served as Chairperson of the Art Department from 1985-90.

Dr. Wahlman has curated numerous exhibits and has written 40 articles on traditional and contemporary African and African American arts. She is the author of four books, including Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts. Recently, she is a co-editor and contributor for Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, published by the Schomburg Center, part of the New York Library. At UMKC, she runs the Global Arts program, advises Interdisciplinary Ph.D. students, and teaches courses in Non-western Arts (ART 315, 497H, 442, 443, 571) and Visual Arts Administration (ART 473/573).


Rochelle Ziskin, PhD
Associate Professor
FA 213, Phone: 816-235-2991
ziskinr@umkc.ed

Dr. Ziskin received her Ph. D. from Harvard University. Her research interests focus on the artistic culture of 17th and 18th-century France. She is the author of The Place Vendôme: Architecture and Social Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Her book-length study Sheltering Art: Cultural Quarrels and Social Identity in early 18th-century Paris, supported by fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, is forthcoming with Penn State University Press.

Currently, she is engaged in a new book-length study of the development of the female realm within the 18th-century French dwelling, exploring the interactions of social constructions of gender and class and their impact on the conception, use, and design of the elite private house.

Professor Ziskin regularly teaches the graduate methods seminar and undergraduate capstone course (Art 5501 and Art 482, "The Scope and Methods of Art History"), as well as surveys of the history of architecture, urbanism, and landscape design: Env-Des 251/Art 254 (the Gothic period to the 18th century) and Env-Des 252/Art 255 (the modern period, from the 18th century to the present). Each year, she offers a specialized seminar for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.