Art History Faculty

Full-Time Faculty

Alfred Acres

Wright Family Term Professor in Art History, Late Medieval and Renaissance Art; Interim Director, Georgetown University Art Galleries

Al Acres is a scholar of late Medieval and Renaissance art, with a core focus on Netherlandish painting. He teaches survey courses on Renaissance art (Northern and Italian), the history of prints, and Western art c. 1300-present, as well seminars on individual artists and wide-ranging conceptual topics that explore diverse approaches to art history. His books and articles variously examine how evolving forms of realism created new frameworks of meaning, engagement, and persuasion in European society. Before coming to Georgetown, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oregon, and Princeton University. 

Ian Bourland

Department Chair; Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor, Art History, Twentieth Century/Atlantic World

Ian Bourland is a critic and historian specializing in Africa and its diasporas and lens/time-based media, especially photography and video. He teaches surveys in global modernist and contemporary art and the history of photography, and seminars on criticism, aesthetic philosophy, and transnational/diaspora cultural practice. His criticism can be found at Artforum, Aperture, and frieze, and he has published two books while contributing to many others. Bourland is an avid music fan, and his project on trip-hop group Massive Attack and the cultural politics of eighties England is  featured in Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.

Lisa Strong

Associate Professor of the Practice, American Art; Director, Art and Museum Studies M.A Program

Prior to her arrival at Georgetown, Lisa Strong served as Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and assistant professor of American Art at James Madison University. She guest-curated an exhibition on Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–74) for the Amon Carter Museum and wrote the accompanying book Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller (2009). She also served as assistant editor for Corcoran Gallery of Art Catalogue of American Paintings to 1945 (2011) and has contributed essays to several other catalogues and books, most recently, ” Indigeneity and Empire in William Clark’s Museum of Indian Curiosities, c.1816–1835″ in U.S. Museum Histories and the Politics of Interpretation: Never Neutral (Routledge, 2023)

Michelle C Wang

Associate Professor, Art History, Asian Art

Michelle C. Wang is a specialist in the Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, primarily of the 6th-10th centuries. Professor Wang teaches courses in Asian art history from the premodern to modern eras. Her first book “Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang” (Brill, 2018) examines Buddhist mandalas of the 8th-10th centuries at the Mogao and Yulin Buddhist cave shrines in northwestern China. In addition to her research on mandalas, she has also written about art and ritual, miracle tales of animated statues, the transcultural reception of Buddhist motifs, and text and image.  Her current work concerns Buddhist sculpture and materiality.

Part-Time and Affiliated Faculty

Irina Denischenko
Assistant Professor, Eastern European Art

Andrea Gallelli Huezo
Adjunct Lecturer, Latin American Art

Tiffany Hunt
Adjunct Lecturer, Medieval Art

Andy Johnson
Adjunct Lecturer, Queer Art and Visual Culture

Cathy Keesling
Professor, Greek Art and Archaeology

Stephanie Rufino
Adjunct Lecturer, Architectural History

Vlad Smolkin
Adjunct Lecturer, Contemporary Art/Art Market

Barrett W Tilney
Adjunct Lecturer, Baroque Art

Emeritus Faculty

Alison Hilton
Emerita, Russian and Modern Art

Elizabeth Prelinger
Emerita, Modern Art History