Board Candidates
2008 CAA Board of Directors Election
Randall C. Griffin, Southern Methodist University
Statement: In order to make CAA a true locus of interdisciplinarity, I would like our organization to entice more people from outside art and art history—in such areas as linguistics, architecture, poetry, and history—to participate in sessions at the Annual Conference. CAA would also benefit from encouraging more artists to get involved in the conference, perhaps with collaborative sessions between artists and art historians that transcend their respective worldviews. Despite our differences, we often grapple with the same issues, for example, the gap between words and images and the ways in which different identities are constructed. Given that artists, art historians, and also museum professionals share many similar interests, and given that each group constitutes about a third of the membership, we should make collaborations and partnerships a major CAA priority.
Biography: Randall C. Griffin is associate professor in the Division of Art History at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas. While completing his PhD in art history at the University of Delaware, he was a fellow for two years at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. He then taught at Vanderbilt University for a year before coming to SMU in 1992.
Griffin has authored several articles, an exhibition catalogue, and two books. Those books, Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004) and Winslow Homer: An American Vision (New York: Phaidon, 2006), each received the Dallas Museum of Art’s Vasari Award.
A committed teacher, he served for six years on the board of SMU’s Center for Teaching Excellence and is the Meadows Foundation Distinguished Teaching Professor for 2007. He has served as chair of SMU’s Division of Art History and is a current member of CAA’s Annual Conference Committee, helping to shape the upcoming conference in Dallas–Fort Worth.