Residential Research Fellows

Winter/Spring 1999
Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine

Fellows

Ken Arnold, Exhibitions Unit Manager, Wellcome Trust, London. An historian of science and a practicing curator, Dr. Arnold's interests lie primarily with questions of collecting and display, which are crucial aspects of the "Microcosms" project. Dr. Arnold is an expert in the variety of display practices that characterize curiosity cabinets. He is also the co-editor of the forth-coming The Collectors Voice: Early Voices (1500-1750) (Scolar Press), and the author and co-editor of the recent exhibition catalogues, Materia Medica: A New Cabinet of Medicine and Art (1995) and Pills and Profits: The Selling of Medicines Since 1870 (1994). Recent chapters he has authored include "Trade, Travel and Treasures: 17th-century Artificial Curiosities," in Transports: Travel, Pleasure and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830 (1996), and "Time Heals: Making History in Medical Museums," in Making Histories in Museums (1996).

Rosemary Joyce, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley. An anthropological archaeologist specializing in Central America and in the study of ceramics, writing, and art, Professor Joyce has been employed since 1985 in anthropology museums in university settings. She has curated exhibitions in both art and anthropology museums in the U.S. and Honduras. As a field archaeologist, the materiality of human culture has been a central concern in her research. Professor Joyce's recent publications have emphasized the use of material culture in the construction of gender and the body. In the collaborative hypertext Sisterstories, she explores the potential of electronic technology for the production of knowledge.

Rebecca Lemov, Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation, White Shoe to White Collar: Bureaucratic Anthropology and the Birth of the Information Age, 1929-1954, will examine the growth in the American social sciences of attempts to distill and file the totality of knowledge about humankind, for purposes of social engineering as well as for general welfare. It focuses on shifts in the aims of five ambitious collections of cultural and anthropological content at Yale, Harvard and affiliated universities; initially intended to be encyclopedic, these collections underwent rapid transformations with the entrance of the U.S. into World War II and the advent of concepts of total war, along with strategic concerns.

Mark Meadow, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Meadow is a specialist in the art and culture of 15th- to 17th-century northern Europe, with particular interest in the relationship between rhetoric and the visual arts. His publications and research include work on Pieter Bruegel, Pieter Aertsen, and Albrecht Duerer; and on the history of collecting, the history of rhetoric, proverbs and proverb collecting, and Early-Modern epistemology. He is on the editorial board of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and co-director of the Netherlands Art Research Institute, jointly based at UC Santa Barbara and in The Hague.

Sonnet Retman, Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Retman received her Ph.D. in English at University of California Los Angeles and is currently revising her dissertation, "Documentary Collections and the 'Real' Collective in the 1930s," into a manuscript for publication. The dissertation examines the relationship between the documentary genre and the collection of evidence in the production of varied and often contradictory cultural nationalisms during the Great Depression. As she examines the slippage between the material collection and a rhetorical notion of the national collective in FDR's federally funded documentary endeavors, she also explores other documentary projects of the era, which reveal a profound anxiety about this strategy. She argues that these counter texts complicate the notion of a national collective by producing more specific narratives of identity and locale.

E. Bruce Robertson, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Robertson was born in New Zealand but has lived in the US and Canada for most of his life. Educated at Swarthmore and Yale University, he received his Ph.D. in Art History in 1987. His career has spanned both museums— working at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and The Cleveland Museum of Art — and universities — teaching at Oberlin, Case Western Reserve, and now UC Santa Barbara. He has stepped down as Department Chair to take the HRI Residency. His research interests are broad,with books and exhibitions ranging from 17th-century Dutch prints and 18th-century British watercolors to early 20th-century American art. In recent years he has begun to concentrate on the institutional nature of museums and their collections during the Progressive Era.

Core Participants

{Residency Description} {HRI Meetings}

{Research & Publications}

{Microcosms}