January 17, 2006
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.—Nicola Courtright, a professor of fine arts at Amherst College, has been elected president of the College Art Association for a two-year term, beginning in May.
A member of the Amherst faculty since 1989, Courtright earned a B.A. degree in art history at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, an M.A. at Yale University and a Ph.D. at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. A specialist in the art and architecture of early modern Europe, she is the author of The Papacy and the Art of Reform in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Gregory XIII and the Tower of the Winds in the Vatican (2003). Courtright also has published in the Grove Dictionary of Art, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte and The Art Bulletin. A Fulbright Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, Courtright recently organized an international conference at Amherst College on the latest subject of her research, the expression of political ideologies of rule for early modern French queens in the art and architecture of their palaces. Her recent sabbatical was supported by the American Association of University Women.
Courtright has been a member of the College Art Association Board of Directors since 2000 and served as vice president for publications from 2004 to 2006. Founded in 1911, the CAA promotes excellence in scholarship and teaching in the history and criticism of the visual arts and in creativity and technical skill in the teaching and practices of art. Its members include more than 13,000 artists, art historians, scholars, curators, collectors, educators, art publishers and other visual arts professionals. Another 2,000 university art and art history departments, museums, libraries, and professional and commercial organizations hold institutional memberships.
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