Melissa Dabakis teaches American and Modern European Art History, and serves as a member of the American Studies Faculty. She is the founding director of the Kenyon in Rome Program , and spent the fall semester of 2009 in Italy with 21 Kenyon students. She is the author of Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic (Cambridge University Press, 1999, 2011 paperback and digital editions). Her new book, The American Corinnes: Women Sculptors and the Eternal City, 1850-1876 (working title) will be published by Penn State University Press in the spring of 2014. She is the Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C. from September 1, 2013 to June 1, 2014.

Areas of Expertise

American and Modern European Art History

Education

B.A .University of Connecticut
M.A., Ph.D. Boston University

Courses Taught

ARHS 111 Survey of Art, part II
ARHS 226 Modern Art I: Rococo to Impressionism
ARHS 227 American Art to 1876
ARHS 230 Modern Art II: Symbolism to Surrealism
ARHS 231 Modern Art III: Art in the Era of the Cold War
ARHS 242 Eternal Glories: Monuments, Museums, and Churches of Rome (Taught in Rome)
ARHS 243 The Social and Cultural History of Florence (Taught in Florence)
ARHS 371 Museum Studies Seminar
ARHS 377 Topics in Modern Art
ARHS 378 Topics in American Art
ARHS 380 Rome in the American Imagination (Taught in Rome)
ARHS 480 Senior Seminar in Art History

AMST 108 Introduction to American Studies
AMST 109 American Art and Culture, 1900-1945
AMST 378 Senior Seminar: Monuments and Memory in American Culture

Affiliations:

College Art Association; Committee on Women in the Arts
American Studies Association
Association of Historians of American Art
Historians of Nineteenth Century Art