Since I'm the only art historian at Millsaps College, I've had the chance to teach a wide variety of courses.  I offer on a regular basis (usually every other year) the standard period courses:  Ancient and Medieval, Italian Renaissance, Northern Renaissance, Baroque, 18th and 19th Century, Modern, and Contemporary.  I've also been lucky to have the chance to teach certain thematic or topics courses, beginning with "Images of Women in Art and Literature: 1500-1900" which I designed with my colleague in the English department, Judy Page, and team-taught several times with her.  I continued to offer it for a few years after she left, and though it wasn't nearly as much fun, in some ways, going solo with the course, I must admit that I really enjoyed having the chance to work through literary texts with my students.  During my years at Millsaps I've grown more and more interested in issues related to women artists (whom I never heard about at all as an undergraduate or even a graduate student!).  It took me a while to gather enough material for a full course, since slides (or color plates from which to take slides) were very hard to come by at first, back in the '80s.  As with "Topics in World Art," one of the theoretical issues we confront in "Women Artists" is whether courses like these should even exist -- or should the artists, images, and ideas be fully incorporated into the various period courses?  Although I often find myself rethinking this question, I generally conclude that there are so many distinctive contextual issues to be considered that separate courses are warranted.  It's a fun issue to debate, though -- and an important one -- so let me know what your ideas are.

In addition to these art history courses, I'm also involved with Millsaps' core curriculum.  Core 1 (formerly "Introduction to Liberal Studies" or LS 1000) is an interdisciplinary, writing-intensive discussion course required of all first-year students -- and it's a great course to teach.  Fifteen students and myself, sitting around in a circle talking about a wide assortment of topics related to a particular theme or set of issues. Last year I taught "The Art of the Essay" and this year I'll teach a more specialized course called "Visual Shock: Controversies in the Visual Arts."

I've been on the staff of the Heritage program, an interdisciplinary humanities course for first-year students here at Millsaps, and continue to give many of the art history lectures for Heritage.  I've also been active in the alternate humanities track:  the IDS (Interdisciplinary Studies) or Topics track.  I've developed a course set in the 15th-16th centuries, centered in Renaissance Italy and Germany but also seriously considering another culture during that same period (either the Japanese or the Aztec).  The focus of this course is the visual arts, which act as a lens onto the politics, history, literature, religion, and philosophy of the culture (which we consider through an assortment of readings). Most recently I've developed an IDS course dealing with the art of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in France, set in the larger context of the history, politics, literature, and philosophy of this age of revolution. We also explore in this course various aspects of the slave trade, as well as Romantic attitudes toward the exotic other.

I'm sure I've learned more as a teacher than I ever did as a student, and I've also found my research interests expanding as a result of teaching so broadly.  If you're interested in learning more about my scholarship, click here.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I'm a messy, disorderly gardener.   Some people kindly label my garden as being "in the English cottage-garden style," but actually, to be truthful, it's the result of random amassing of whatever plants happen to strike my fancy.  I tend to get obsessed with certain species, like dianthus and geraniums (true geraniums, not pelargoniums) and salvias and old roses. Some particularly awful weeds have appeared and drive me batty with their uncanny ability to prosper and spread rampantly, so if you ever get a pass-along plant from my garden be sure to wash all the dirt off the roots to check for unwanted passengers.  It pleases me greatly that I've got plants from various beloved friends' gardens -- especially my mother, Daisy, Sue, and Judy. I like the give and take of gardening, the liveliness of insects buzzing about everywhere, the earthworms casting their way through what's gradually becoming soil (many barrows-full of compost later), and the birds that make our garden home (not to mention the stray possums, raccoons, squirrels, snakes, and spiders).

Elise cleaning the pond, 2006

List of roses I have (or have had) in my garden:

Duchesse de Brabant
Cornelia
Rosa rugosa Rubra
Lady Banks
Pink Meidiland
Carefree Beauty
The Fairy
Mrs. B. R. Cant
Little White Pet
Pink Pet
Caldwell Pink (which I'm convinced is the same as Pink Pet)
Heritage
Topaz Jewel
Buff Beauty
Marie Pavie
Frau Dagmar Hastrup
Petite Pink Scotch
Louise Odier
Gruss an Aachen
Clothilde Soupert
Lavendar Lassie
Marquise Bocella
Mutabilis
Rosa rugosa Hansa
Bonica
Blush Noisette?
Nearly Wild
Hermosa
Souvenir de la Malmaison
Zephirine Drouhin
Climbing Old Blush
Margo Koster
Felicia
Jens Munk

List of salvias I have (or have had) in my garden:

Indigo Spires
uliginosa
van houttii
guaranitica
greggii
argentea
Mexican bush sage
patens
victoria
Blue Bedder
mexicana
madrensis
involucrata
transcaucasica
stenophyllum

List of dianthus I have (or have had) in my garden:

superbus longicalycinus
spottii
x allwoodii 'Patience' and 'Helen'
Danielle Marie
Granite Pink
Spring Beauty
Tiny Rubies
Essex Witch
Doris
Bath's Pink

Geraniums I have (or have had):

Claridge Druce
sanguineum
pratense
Wargrave Pink

Major regrets:  bad soil preparation in spots, spotty record with clematis, bad luck or judgment choosing some key trees and shrubs . . .
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

My scholarship in graduate school was focused on the Renaissance and Baroque periods.  I wrote my master's thesis at Vanderbilt on 17th century Dutch vanitas still life paintings, and my doctoral dissertation at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on the early 16th-century Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden (published in 1992 by the University of Missouri Press as The Paintings of Lucas van Leyden).  As a result of my wide-ranging teaching at Millsaps, though, I've gotten more and more interested in art related to women (women artists and images of women).  These new professional interests have pulled me into later periods.  It began with the course that Judy Page and I designed and team-taught, "Images of Women in Art and Literature: 1500-1900," and continued with my research on a bronze Confederate Women's Monument by Belle Kinney located in front of the capitol building in Jackson (published as a 1994 article in Southern Quarterly).  The sculpture was here in my own home town (not overseas in the Netherlands) and was by a woman artist whom I'd never heard of before, but I must admit that it was quite strange to be reading various highly nostalgic articles and poems in Confederate Veterans' journals in order to understand more about attitudes toward Confederate as well as turn-of-the-century Southern women.

My primary scholarly focus beginning in 1995 was the late Victorian English artist Evelyn Pickering  De Morgan.  I first ran across her work in the form of beautiful color illustrations in a book of women's poetry, Sound the Deep Waters, that Judy Page and I used in our "Images of Women" course one year.  The images were compelling for several reasons:  stylistically lush, in the late Pre- Raphaelite movement, they also seemed to present unusual mythological, historical, literary, and allegorical themes -- almost all with female protagonists.  As I argue in various articles and presentations, and in my book Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), in paintings such as Hope in the Prison of Despair and The Soul's Prison House she represented women as members of a constraining civilization, who exhibit at times a sort of drooping resignation, but in works like The Storm Spirits the women are powerful natural elements, actively in control of their destinies.   On one level, these are allegories of the bondage of materialism and embodiment, showing the redemptive possibility of the soul's liberation from those constraints.  The idea of spiritual progress toward the afterlife is recurrent in her art, arising from a personal involvement in the movement of Spiritualism.  On another level, however, common ground can also be found for some of these images in the late Victorian social and political discourse concerning a woman's search for autonomy and for the physical and psychic space needed for independent action.  De Morgan's images of imprisonment show women bound, as all humans are, by mortal flesh, but bound, more specifically, by female role norms of a patriarchal civilization.  Woman's freedom, as expressed in De Morgan's paintings of women as personifications of natural elements, is also two-fold, consisting of a non-gendered movement toward spirituality, toward the ethereal, but also as a particularly female turn away from stagnant domesticity toward the positive energies of creative expression.

Currently I'm working on a book with my friend Judy Page, whose specialty is British Romantic poetry and who teaches now at the University of Florida. We're exploring the role of women in the domestication of the English landscape, c.1750-1850, looking at a wide range of texts by women: instructional manuals in gardening, drawing, and watercolor, treatises on botany, children's books, moral tales, popular poetry, novels, and garden-related illustrations, among others.

L to R: Elise, Matt, Steve, Katy, Elizabeth Durden, and Dee Weems

Matt and Katy

Elise, June, and Katy, 2003

Maura and Katy on Mountain Day at Mount Holyoke College, 2002

Matt and Kelly, 2004

Elise, Katy, and Steve at Katy's Mount Holyoke graduation, 2005

Katy, graduation weekend, 2005

Steve and Katy, Crossroads Film Festival filmmakers, 2005

Steve, Matt, and Elise, 2006

Steve grading papers, 2006

Bryan family (Keith, Alice, Laurie, Brad, Kelly, and Matt Smith)

Bryan Family at Keith's graduation, 2007

ADDRESS

Box 150390, Department of
Millsaps College
Jackson, Mississippi 39210
(601) 974-1432
Fax: (601) 974-1397
E-mail: smithel@millsaps.edu

1611 Edgewood Street
Jackson, Mississippi 39202
(601) 354-2290

EDUCATION

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1976-1981
Ph.D. in Art History, December 1981
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 1975-1976
M.A. in Art History, December 1977
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, 1971-1973
F.S.U. Overseas Study Program, London, 1972
B.A. in Art History, August 1973
Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa
Florida Presbyterian College, St. Petersburg, FL, 1970-1971

DISSERTATION

The Paintings of Lucas van Leyden (J. Richard Judson, advisor)

AWARDS AND HONORS

Distinguished Professor Award, Millsaps College, 2005
Mississippi Humanities Council Humanities Teacher Award for Millsaps College, 2004
Distinguished Professor Award, Millsaps College, 1994
Fulbright-Hayes Grant to Belgium, 1984-1985
Chester Dale Fellowship, National Gallery of Art, 1980-1981
Samuel H. Kress Travel Grant, University of North Carolina, 1979-1980
Samuel H. Kress Fellowship, University of North Carolina, 1979-1980
Fulbright-Hayes Grant to the Netherlands, 1978-1979

BOOKS

Evelyn De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002)
The Paintings of Lucas van Leyden (Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 1992).

ARTICLES, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS

"Commanding a View: The Taylor Sisters and the Construction of Domestic Space" (under consideration)

"'In the home-garden': The Arbor, Wall, and Gate in Moral Tales for Children" (under consideration)

"Marie Hull." Mississippi Encyclopedia, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and Ted Ownby (forthcoming with the University Press of Mississippi, 2008).

"'The aged pollard's shade': Gainsborough's Landscape with Woodcutter and Milkmaid" (scheduled for Eighteenth Century Studies 41.1 [Fall 2007]).

"'Whom the gods love die young': Evelyn De Morgan and the Legend of the Wandering Jew." British Art Journal 7.3 (Winter 2006/2007): 29-39.

Review of Jane Carroll and Alison G. Stewart, eds., Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Historians of Netherlandish Art Newsletter and Review of Books 22.1 (April 2005): 16-17; also http://www.hnanews.org/archive /2004/Carroll.html.

"Double Vision: Evelyn De Morgan and Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Evelyn De Morgan: Collected Essays (under consideration).

"Myth as Spiritual Allegory in the Art of Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919)." The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies n.s. 7 (Fall 1998): 53-73.

"The Paintings of Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919)." Woman's Art Journal 18:2 (Fall- Winter 1997-98): 3-10.

"Evelyn Pickering De Morgan's Allegories of Imprisonment." Victorian Literature and Culture 25:2 (1997): 293-317.

"Pieter van Aelst," "Jan van Amstel," "The Brunswick Monogrammist," and "Hans Eworth." The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner. 34 vols. New York: Grove, 1996. 1:165, 1:799, 10:666-67, 20:792-93.

"Engebrechtsz. (or Engelbrechtsen), Cornelis," "Van Leyden, Aertgen (Aert Claesz.)," and "Van Leyden, Lucas." Dutch Art. An Encyclopedia, ed. Sheila D. Muller. New York and London: Garland, 1997. 127, 425-26.

"The Turbulent Years: Selections from the Tougaloo Collection." Jackson: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1994. Catalogue essay for guest-curated exhibition.

"Belle Kinney and the Confederate Women's Monument." Southern Quarterly 32:4 (Summer 1994): 2-27.

"Women and the Moral Argument of Lucas van Leyden's Dance Around the Golden Calf." Art History 15:3 (September 1992): 296-316.

PAPERS DELIVERED

"Enclosed in the home-garden: Maria Elizabeth Budden and the Cultivation of Virtue in Early 19th Century Children's Literature," British Women Writers Conference, Gainesville, FL, March 2006.

"'The more delicately constitutioned botanist': Agnes Ibbetson, Anna Maria Hussey, and Early 19th-Century Field Botany," Southeastern College Art Conference, Little Rock, AR, October 2005.

"Knots, Boils, and Cankers: The Pollarded Oak in English Art," Mississippi Humanities Council Humanities Teacher Award Lecture, Millsaps College, October 2004.

"'The aged pollard's shade': Gainsborough's Landscape with Woodcutter and Milkmaid," Southeastern College Art Conference, Raleigh, NC, October 2003.

"'The nearest approach to the spiritual': Woman as Spiritual Protagonist in the Art of Evelyn De Morgan," College Art Association, Philadelphia, PA, February 2002.

"Spiritual Heroines in the Art of Evelyn De Morgan," Southeastern College Art Conference, Columbia, SC, October 2001.

"The Construction of a Life: Wilhelmina Stirling's Biography of her Sister Evelyn De Morgan," Southeastern College Art Conference, Louisville, KY, October 2000.

"Witnessing Death in the Art of Evelyn De Morgan," Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Philadelphia, PA, March 1999.

"'Dim is the Light from Beyond': Mortality and Spiritualism in Evelyn De Morgan's Nocturnal Imagery," Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Huntsville, AL, April 1998.

"Do Art Historians Ever Turn the Lights On?: Teaching Students to Think in the Art History Survey," Southeastern College Art Conference, Richmond, VA, October 1997.

"'That Incessant Struggle': Evelyn Pickering De Morgan's Allegories of Imprisonment and Freedom," Southeastern College Art Conference, Washington, D.C., October 1995.

"Who Am I, How Do I Know, and How Do I Act Responsibly? The Visual Arts in a Core Curriculum," presented with undergraduate student Lea Barton, College Art Association, San Antonio, January 28, 1995.

"The Visual Arts in an Introduction to Liberal Studies Course," Society for Values in Higher Education, Bowdoin College, August 1993.

"Incorporating Non-Western Material into an Interdisciplinary Core Humanities Course," Society for Values in Higher Education, Colorado College, August 1992.

"Images of Southern Womanhood: Angels, Queens, and Mothers in Monuments to Confederate Women," Honors Program Forum, University of Alabama,
Huntsville, May 14, 1992.

"Belle Kinney and the Confederate Women's Monument," Southeastern College Art Conference, Memphis, October 31, 1991; abstract in Secac Review, XII, No. 2 (1992), 124-125.

"Writing as a Means to Assessment and Valuation in an Art History Survey Class," Society for Values in Higher Education, Williams College, August 5, 1990.

"The Theme of the 'Power of Women' in the Paintings of Lucas van Leyden," Millsaps College Friday Forum, April 11, 1986.

"Card Games as Moralizing Allegories: The Iconographic Significance of Lucas van Leyden's Card Players," Southeastern College Art Conference, Chattanooga, October 28, 1983.

"Italian Influence on the Late Paintings of Lucas van Leyden," Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art, Washington, D.C., March 29, 1980.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Member, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Reaffirmation Committee, Southwestern University, April 2002
Editorial Board, Southern Quarterly, 1999-
Board of Directors, Southeastern College Art Conference, 2000-06
Professor, Millsaps College, 1999-
Associate Professor, Millsaps College, 1992-1999
Assistant Professor, Millsaps College, 1988-1992
Adjunct Instructor, Millsaps College, 1986-1987
Adjunct Instructor, North Carolina Wesleyan College, Rocky Mount, 1981-1984
Research Assistant, University of North Carolina, 1977-1978
Teaching Assistant, University of North Carolina, 1976-1977
Teaching Assistant, Vanderbilt University, 1975-1976

SELECTED COLLEGE SERVICE

Acting Associate Dean of Arts and Letters, Millsaps College, Spring 2006
Chair, Art Department, Millsaps College, 1992-96, 1997-2001, 2004-
Strategic Planning Committee, 2001-03
Career Development Advisory Committee, 2002-03
Tenure and Promotion Committee, 1999-2002
Director, Millsaps College SACS Self-Study, 1999-2002
Director, "Introduction to Liberal Studies" Core Program, Millsaps College, 1997-2000
Acting Director, "Introduction to Liberal Studies" Core Program, Millsaps College, 1996
Director, Ford Fellowship Program, Millsaps College, 1991-96
Divisional Personnel Committee, Millsaps College, 1993-96, 2002-2003, 2004-2005, 2007-
Women's Studies Advisory Committee, Millsaps College, 1989-96
Sexual Harassment Panel, Millsaps College, 1993-96
European Studies Advisory Committee and Coordinating Committee of European Studies Program, Millsaps College, 1990-96
Phi Beta Kappa Committee, Millsaps College, 1988-96, 1997- ; President, 1995-96; Secretary/Treasurer, 2001-
Faculty Council, Millsaps College, 1989-91
Chair, Subcommittee on the Undergraduate Program, SACS Self-Study Steering Committee, Millsaps College, 1990-92
Vice-President, American Association of University Professors, Millsaps chapter, 1990-91
Core Council, Millsaps College, 1991-92, 1995-96, 1997-2000
Curriculum Revision Committee, Millsaps College, 1990
LS 1000 Syllabus Revision Committee, Millsaps College, 1993-94
Student Affairs Committee, Millsaps College, 1988-90
Advisor, Millsaps Art Club, 1989-96
Sponsor of Ford Fellows, 1990-98
Advisor, Honors theses, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2003, 2004, 2006-07

COURSES TAUGHT

Art Appreciation
Survey of Western Art, 2-semester sequence
Italian Renaissance Art
Northern Renaissance Art
Baroque Art
18th and 19th Century Art
Modern Art
Contemporary Art
Women Artists
Images of Women in Art and Literature, 1400-1900
Topics in World Art (Chinese, Japanese, African, and Aztec)
Heritage of the West (team-taught interdisciplinary humanities course)
Introduction to Liberal Studies (core first-year course)
Visual Shock: Controversies in the Visual Arts (core first-year course)
Self and Community in the Sixteenth Century (interdisciplinary humanities course)
Art and Revolution: Visual Propaganda during the French Age of Revolution (interdisciplinary humanities course)
History of Architecture
Junior-Senior Art Seminar
Art History Junior-Senior Seminar: Pre-Raphaelite Art
Art History Junior-Senior Seminar: Dutch Baroque Genre Painting
Art History Junior-Senior Seminar: Contemporary Art
Art History Junior-Senior Seminar: Jan van Eyck and the Northern Renaissance

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

College Art Association
Historians of British Art
Nineteenth Century Studies Association
North American Conference on British Studies
Southeastern College Art Conference