Event: Public talk

Location: NEC conference hall

Thomas DACOSTA KAUFMANN
Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Picking up from previous essays on problems of periodization, this lecture considers a wide range of issues presented by archaeology and art history dealing with different times and places throughout the world. After summarizing some theoretical considerations, it presents some practical issues encountered in writing a history of art starting with the earliest artifacts that humans have made and continuing until more recent times. The lecture intends to stimulate further reflection on practical as well as theoretical aspects of historiography.

Thomas DACOSTA KAUFMANN is Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Author of over 250 articles and reviews and of thirteen books, and editor of five more, he has received many honors and prizes, including honorary doctorates from universities in Brno and Dresden. He is a fellow of the Swedish, Flemish, and Polish Academies, and of the American Academies in Rome and Berlin. In addition to his long-standing interests in Central Europe, he has written on the geography and historiography of art, and questions of humanism, art, and science. For a decade he has been concerned with questions of global exchange and world art history, the topic of his major current project