Alicia Volk and Jordana Saggese promoted to rank of Full Professor

Professors Saggese and Volk recognized for their exceptional scholarship and teaching in the field

The University of Maryland recently promoted Dr. Jordana Saggese and Dr. Alcia Volk to the rank of Full Professor.

Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese is Professor of American Art and the former Editor-in-Chief for the College Art Association's Art Journal.

Her research focuses on modern and contemporary American art, with an emphasis on expressions of Blackness. Across Dr. Saggese's research projects there is an investment in the line between popular culture and critical culture. This investment manifests in the subjects and methodologies of her research, which draw equally from visual culture studies and the traditional history of art, as well as in the dissemination of findings across both academic and general audiences. Dr. Saggese's art history capitalizes on the cultural appeal of the popular in order to speak back to the exclusionary tactics of cultural institutions, while also making connections between pop culture and the reality of life in the United States.

An expert on the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, Professor Saggese wrote a book on the artist, The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews and Critical Responses, published last year as part of the University of California Press's award-winning Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses series that is essential reading for scholars of this artist and the period in which he worked. Her current book project, Game On: Boxing, Race, and Masculinity, maps the visual terrain of racial ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of blackness, masculinity, and sport in the late nineteenth century. 

Dr. Alicia Volk is a Professor of Japanese Art. Her scholarship addresses a range of mediums and critical issues in Japanese art from the nineteenth century to the present. Among her scholarly works, Professor Volk's In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010) was awarded the inaugural Phillips Book Prize of the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art.  Her current book project is Democratizing Japanese Art 1945-1960, which examines the rebuilding and restructuring of the Japanese art world in the context of defeat and occupation following World War II. Her publications have treated such topics as Japanese prints, screens (byôbu), and illustrated books; the avant-garde, images of blacks and racialized representation, the geopolitical dimensions of Japanese self-representations at world's fairs, female artists, and contemporary art. Across all of these topics, Professor Volk remains committed to analyzing Japanese art on its own terms and to challenging the assumptions and biases undergirding an art historical canon that places it at the margins.

An excellent teacher in the classroom, Professor Volk brings her students, undergraduate and graduate, to a close understanding of Asian and Japanese art and the processes by which they are made, whether through museum visits or class productions of works in the style of key monuments, such as narrative scroll painting.

Professor Saggese, too, inspires students in her graduate and undergraduate courses, which are informed by her interests in the history of photography, print culture, abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, post-colonial theory, and disability studies. Most of her classes rely on the rich resources of the DC Metro area - particularly galleries and museums - to bring the history of art into real time and space for students. 

Congratulations Professors Saggese and Volk, and continued success and excellence in the future!