The Art Bulletin
Editors of The Art Bulletin
Karen Lang (2010–13)
Karen Lang (photograph by Flora Lang)
Karen Lang, associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California (USC), will become editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin starting July 1, 2010. She succeeds Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, who has led the journal since 2007.
An Angeleno since the early 1990s, Lang earned her PhD in the history of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1996, with a dissertation on “The German Monument, 1790–1914: Subjectivity, Memory, and National Identity.” She has taught nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, visual culture, and aesthetics at USC since 1999, earning tenure seven years later. Lang received a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant in 2005 for her book, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), which studies the conceptual foundations of the history of art.
She writes, “The Art Bulletin will celebrate its centennial in 2013, two years after CAA’s own one-hundredth anniversary. During the journal’s century, findings and frays shaped the contours of the field, as queries arising from the correlation of artistic objects and their histories—queries about subject and style, inclusion and exclusion, gender, race, sexuality, and so on—ushered the discipline in new directions. Art history was vibrant during these hundred years, and it continues to be so today. As The Art Bulletin glides into a new century, I would like the journal to reflect art history’s widening scope and its manifold practices. Specialty publications exist for many fields of art history, but The Art Bulletin is the primary site for critical, cross-field dialogue. To reflect what art history is today and to stimulate dialogue, as editor-in-chief I welcome first-rate scholarship from all fields and approaches. I will continue the journal’s commitment to the scholarly article (at a time when short articles are increasingly the mandate), and I will introduce new features. Drawing on the vibrancy of art and art history today, these will include reflections on the viewing experience of art and notes from the field.”
Lang’s experience with The Art Bulletin began in 1997, when her article “The Dialectics of Decay: Rereading the Kantian Subject” was published in the September issue. She also penned “The Far in the Near,” as part of Michael Ann Holly’s Interventions section on “The Melancholy Art” in March 2007. She has also written on such diverse subjects as the work of Gerhard Richter, the modernism of Max Beckmann, Alexander Pope’s garden and grotto, and the Bismarck Monument in Hamburg, as well as on topics in aesthetics. She’s written for the Getty Research Journal, Human Affairs, X-TRA, and Art History, published by the Association of Art Historians in the UK. A recent notable publication is “Expressionism and the Two Germanys,” in the catalogue for Cold War Cultures/Art of Two Germanys, a landmark exhibition held last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which traveled to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg and to the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.
Lang was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2007–8 and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2001. She has received numerous awards and travel grants, and has presented her research in conference and symposia across the United States and Europe.
Issues of The Art Bulletin edited by Richard Powell will appear through December 2010, with Lang’s first issue slated for March 2011.
Published in May 2010.
