BIO

Margaretta M. Lovell is the Jay D. McEvoy Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.  She received her PhD in American Studies at Yale in 1980, and has taught in the History of Art departments at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; she has held the Dittman Chair in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, and the Ednah Root Curatorial Chair for American Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  Awards include fellowships, residencies, and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Terra Foundation, the University of California (Chancellor’s and President’s Fellowships), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her Art in a Season of Revolution was awarded the Eldredge Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the pre-1800 book prize from the Organization of Historians of British Art; her earlier A Visitable Past received  the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize of the American Studies Association,.  She has served as Chair of U.C. Berkeley Academic Senate Committee on Educational Policy, and as Director of the American Studies Program.  As Curator and Project Manager she has arranged major international exhibitions on American and British art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Huntington Library, and the National Museum of Western Art Tokyo.

Her teaching includes a variety of courses and seminars including: Art, Architecture and Design in the United States; British and American Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; Landscape Painting and Photography in America; Sargent, Whistler, and Cassatt; Homer and Eakins; Folk Art in America; American Domestic Architecture; Decorative Arts Designed by Architects; California Architecture 1890-1920; William Morris and C. R. Mackintosh; the American Forest, its History, Ecology, and Representation (with Joe McBride); Food in American Culture (with Kathleen Moran); the Collection, the Collector, and the Novel (with Elizabeth Honig); and Material Culture Theory (with Pat Berger).  She has two daughters, one a physician and the other a field biologist.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

“Trophy Heads” (in preparation)

The Inhabited Landscape:  Fitz Henry Lane’s Antebellum America (in preparation)

“The Forest, The Copper Mine, and the Sea:  The Alchemical and Social Materiality of                        Greene and Greene,” in Anne Mallek and Edward Bosley, eds., Greene and Greene:  A New and Native Beauty, exh. cat. Huntington Museum, 2008, in press.

American Encounters (Prentice Hall, 2007), with Bryan Wolf, Angela Miller, David                        Lubin, Jennifer Roberts, and Janet Berlo, pp. 56-72, 78-88, 98-169, 114-31, 149-60, 176-81, 243; 248-51.

Art in a Season of Revolution:  The Artist, the Artisan, and the Patron in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

"Food Photography and Inverted Narratives of Desire," Exposure, v. 33, fall 2001, 21-6.

"Picturing the 'City for a Single Summer:' Images of the Chicago 1893 Columbian World's Exposition, Art Bulletin, March 1996, v.78, n.1, pp. 40-55.

A Visitable Past:  Views of Venice by American Artists 1860-1915 (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Venice:  The American View, 1860-1920 (San Francisco:  Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Washington University Press, 1984), exh. cat.

William Morris:  The Sanford and Helen Berger Collection (Berkeley: Univ. Art Museum an Bancroft Library, 1984), exh. cat., with A. Bliss, pp. 8-29, 48-52.

Research Interests:

Current research interests include eighteenth-century American painting and decorative arts with an emphasis on artists, artisans, their markets and their patrons; nineteenth-century American painting (especially landscape painting) and aesthetic theory; the ideology of c. 1900 design and architecture in England, Europe, and America; pre-contact Native American design and architecture; and vernacular aesthetic theory in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century American photography and design.

Current PhD Students (as dissertation chair):
Jessica May, "Walker Evan's Workers: Labor, Politics, and American Photography, 1935-45" History of Art, UCB

Elizabeth Bennett Hupp , "Before the Graven Image: Photographs of the Amish and the Politics of Expectation (chair)" History of Art, UCB

Former PhD Students (as dissertation chair):
2004-05
Sarah M. Newman, "Excavating New York: George Bellows's Landscapes of Modernity" History of Art, UCB

2003-04
Kevin Muller, "Cultural Costuming: Native Americans, Inversion, and the Power of an Exceptional White Masculinity" History of Art, UCB

Melissa Trafton, "Critics, Collectors, and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for the Paintings of John Frederick Kensett" History of Art, UCB

2002-03
Isabel Breskin, "Visualizing the Nineteenth-Century American City: Lithographic Views of San Francisco, 1849-1905" History of Art, UCB

2001-02
MaryKate McMaster, "A Publisher's Hand:  Creative Gambles and Cultural Leadership by Moses Dresser Phillips in Antebellum America" American Studies, William and Mary

Kara Olsen-Theiding, “Through the Looking Glass:  Engagements with History and the Decorative Arts in Britain, 1870-1910” History of Art, UCB

2000-01
Eleanor Hughes, "Vessels of Empire: Marine Painting in Eighteenth-Century Britain" History of Art, UCB

1999-2000
Yugin Yagichi, "Social and Economic Formation of Modernity in Japan: The Role of the United States in Sapporo, 1870-1890" American Studies, William and Mary

1997-98
Carma Gorman, "Design and Visual Culture in the United States, 1925-1950" History of Art, UCB

1996-97
Anne Verplanck, "Recorded in Philadelphia: The Form, Function, and Meaning of Silhouettes, Minatures, and Daguerrotypes, 1760-1860" American Studies, William and Mary

1995-96
Marjorie Walter, "Fine Art and the Sweet Science: On Thomas Eakins, His Boxing Paintings, and Turn-of-the-Century Philadelphia" History of Art, UCB

Linda Graham, "The Economy and the Ideology of the Studio: Late Nineteenth-Century American Images of the Artist's Studio" History of Art, UCB

1994-95
Derrick Cartwright, "Reading Rooms: The Ideology of the American Liberty Mural, 1890-1930" (co-chair) History of Art, University of Michigan

1993-94
Kathleen Butler, "Tradition and Discovery: The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent" History of Art, UCB

1989-90
Kirk Savage, "Race, Memory, and Identity: The National Monuments of the Union and the Confederacy" History of Art, UCB