Renée Ater

An art historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, I hold a B.A. in art history from Oberlin College, and earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the University of Maryland. My research and writing have focused largely on the intersections of race, monument building, and national identity.

Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past: Race, Memorialization, Public Space, and Civic Engagement is my current research project. In this planned digital publication, I investigate how we visualze, interpret, and engage the slave past through contemporary monuments to slavery. Through an examiniation of twenty-five monuments in the South, Midwest, and Northeast, I tell a diverse story about our engagement with the slave past. My research is predicated on the idea that the memorializatin of slavery is plural and multi-vocal, and is rotted in the interwoven nature of the social, the historical, and the spatial. Funding for this project is provided by: National Endowment for the Humanities-Mellon Foundation (2018); The Getty Research Institute (2018); and the Smithsonian Office of Fellowships & Internships (2019).

My colleague Yui Suzuki and I specialize in the incorporation of mindfulness practices in the classrooms, museums and art spaces. In August 2014, we attended the 10th Summer Session on Contemplative Pedagogy at Smith College sponsored by The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (http://www.contemplativemind.org/). At the Summer Session, we came together with a diverse group of faculty, university administrators, librarians, artists and other professionals to consider the intersection of teaching, learning, and contemplative pedagogy. We learned core principles and methods of applying mindfulness in the classroom. With the training we received in innovative approaches to contemplative learning in higher education, we incorporated mindfulness practices into our graduate and undergraduate courses from September 2014. In November 2015, we introduced the faculty and graduate students in the Department of Art History and Archaeology to the core principles of mindfulness in our Pressly Forum presentation. In fall semester of 2016, we team-taught a course entitled "Art and Mindful Practices," which explored the intersection of the visual arts and mindfulness practices. Arranged thematically, the course considered how artists and cultures have engaged mindfulness and contemplative practices through a cross-cultural and cross-temporal approach to the arts.

Faculty Spotlight, Fall 2013

Pressly Forum, November 2015, "Mindfulness in the Classroom"