Elizabeth Rodini
Director, Program in Museums and Society
Teaching Professor, History of Art
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
Telephone: (410) 516-4827
Email: erodini@jhu.edu
Academic Background: My undergraduate degrees are in History and Italian Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1986). I received my Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago (1995), where I wrote a dissertation on representations of the Levant in late medieval and early Renaissance Venice. From 1998 to 2003, I was the Mellon Projects Curator at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, tasked with building connections between faculty, students, and the work of the museum. Among the exhibitions I co-curated at the Smart were The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe, The Theatrical Baroque, and Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800. In 2004, I moved to Baltimore to become Museum Liaison between the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and Johns Hopkins University. Since the summer of 2006, I have been the Associate Director of the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins. I continue to hold adjunct curatorial positions at both the BMA and the Walters and to be interested in building productive relationships between museums and universities.
Research Interests: I have a long-standing interest in the representation and material expression of cultural exchange in the early modern period. My publications include articles on the mosaics of San Marco (Word & Image, 1998) and representations of that church by Gentile Bellini (Art History, 1998). Forthcoming studies consider Bellini's portrait of Sultan Mehmet II and Vittore Carpaccio's Saint Ursula cycle. More recently, as my teaching has turned to museum history and theory, my research has focused increasingly on the changing meanings of objects in circulation. I am working on a study of the notion of exoticism in the domestic objects of Renaissance Venice, and on a book-length investigation of Bellini's Sultan portrait as it circulated from Istanbul to Venice to London and beyond. My teaching, particularly my course on "material migrations" at the Walters Art Museum, builds on this work. I am also interested in the role museums play in the larger cultural discourse. My article for caa.reviews, "The Ivory Tower and the Crystal Palace: Universities, Museums, and the Potential for Public Art History" (2007), explores this relationship with a focus on university art museums. I have been a field editor for exhibitions for caa.reviews since the fall of 2008.
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