Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Friday, March 22, 2013 in HART, VRC.

The History of Art Department announces the appointment of Kevin Murphy, John Rewald Professor of Art History and Executive Officer of the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, as the new department chair beginning fall semester 2013. Professor Murphy (PhD, Northwestern University, 1992) has written on historicism in the United States and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as on American material culture.

Professor Murphy’s work has considered the variety of expressions of historicism in historic preservation projects, in the representation of medieval architecture in modernist painting, and in architectural historiography. He has written on French architect and theorist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, on the Colonial Revival in the United States, and on the historiography of early American architecture. He is currently researching a book that will use the figure of Lafayette as a starting point for a consideration of memorializing republics in the Revolutionary Atlantic.

Among his publications are Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture and Community on the Eastern Frontier (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), The Houses of Greenwich Village (Harry N. Abrams, 2008), The American Townhouse (Harry N. Abrams, 2005), and Colonial Revival Maine (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004). He recently edited (with Sally O’Driscoll) Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print (Bucknell University Press, 2013). Forthcoming is an article in the Journal of Urban History entitled “The Historic Building in the Modernized City: The Cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in the Nineteenth Century.”

Professor Murphy has also taught in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He has held Fulbright, Chateaubriand, and National Gallery of Art fellowships, a Graham Foundation grant, and has been a Chester Dale Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.