Art History

Dr. Elizabeth Carroll is a specialist in the art of early modern Venice and leads an SJSU Faculty Led Program in Venice, Italy. Her teaching interests include early modern Europe and History of Interior Design. She teaches Design in Society, the Art of 15 th and 16 th - century Italy, and the History of Interior Design. She has written articles on 16 th - century Venetian art and co-edited multi-author volumes on the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior and A Cultural History of Furniture. She has recently co-authored a chapter titled “Environmental equity for students in the library and LEED buildings,” in Practicing Social Justice in Libraries, ed. Alyssa Brissett and Diana Moronta, 2023. Her teaching interests in Design History emerged from her research on the Renaissance Italian Interior.

PhD in Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington
MA in Art History, Indiana University, Bloomington
BA in Art History, Occidental College

Dr. Hankwitz is originally from Massachusetts. She studied Architecture and Art in New New Haven, CT and New York City, before moving west to live in California. Her doctorate was completed at CIRAC/Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, 2011. She first taught at Illinois Institute of Technology and San Francisco State University Inter-Arts and Conceptual Information Art programs. In Australia she lectured at QUT School of the Arts and Griffith University’s New Genres and Film, Media and Cultural Studies programs. She is an experienced curator and writer on new and experimental media, feminist architectural history, and documentary film. She publishes  with Leonardo Digital Reviews and lectures in Art History at SJSU. Her research interests are new media and digital art history, post industrial design, and 20th c art.

Dr. Sarah Mills is an assistant professor of art history, specializing in textiles, modern craft and design and contemporary art. She teaches courses across departments of Design and Art and Art History in the BA/BFA and MA/MFA programs. Her teaching interests include craft theory, modern design history, speculative design, textiles and technology, conceptual art and participatory practices. Her primary research focuses on the cultural history of modern American weaving.

Her current book project asks how plastic, a kind of artificial material intelligence, transformed the practice of weaving in the United States and to what extent these changes altered the status and perception of textile design. Dr. Mills also writes on the field of electronic textiles, “expanded textiles” or fiber design in contemporary art, and intersections between technology and materiality. Her work has been supported most recently by a fellowship at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney (2022), a Chester Dale fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018 - 2019) and awards from the Decorative Arts Trust, the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where Dr. Mills completed her M.Phil and PhD. Sarah has lived abroad in Minsk, Berlin, Konstanz, Corrientes, and Cape Town, which she considers critical to her worldview.  

sarahvmills.com

Anthony Raynsford is an architectural and urban design historian, whose interdisciplinary research interests bridge across cultural, intellectual and art history, particularly of the 20th century. His teaching seeks to develop a critical understanding of the interlocking social and aesthetic issues faced by architects and designers, both currently and historically.

Professor Raynsford's current book project is entitled, Modernism and the Archaic City: The Pre-Industrial Past in the Imagination of 20th Century Urban Design. Revising standard accounts of modernism's break with the past, he contends that preindustrial urban forms have always been central to the ideals and images of modernist urbanism. The modernist 'discovery' of the archaic city did not, as some authors have suggested, first emerge as a means of softening the edges of earlier functionalism. Rather, his book argues, this figure of the archaic city was instrumental in defining the essence of modernist urbanism from the beginning. Related to this project are a number of works in progress, including a monograph on the writings of urban planner, Kevin Lynch.

Dr. Raynsford received his PhD from the University of Chicago and his M.Arch. from UCLA. He has taught previously in the art history departments of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. Publications include, "Swarm of the Metropolis: Passenger Circulation at Grand Central Terminal and the Ideology of the Crowd Aesthetic," (Journal of Architectural Education) and "Embodying Urban Design" (in Embodied Utopias). He has presented a number of papers on the intellectual and cultural history of urban design at the conferences of such organizations as the International Planning History Society and the College Art Association. His teaching interests include the histories of modern architecture and urban design; the representations of the built environment in painting, film and photography; the historiography of modern art; and aesthetic theories of the 19th and 20th centuries.

anthonyraynsford.net

Liz Linden is an artist based in Berkeley, California. She received a BA in Literature from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 2002 and was a studio artist in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City from 2008 to 2009.  In 2018 she received a PhD in Visual Art from the University of Wollongong in Australia.  Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the New Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum (all in New York City), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia, The Agnes Etherington Centre in Ontario, Canada, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Her critical writing about contemporary art has appeared in recent issues of October, Art Journal, Third Text, The Anthropocene Review and Camera Obscura.  Her book, Shift Work: Art and Life in the Third Millennium, co-authored with art historian Susan Ballard, is forthcoming from Punctum Books.  She teaches about photography and contemporary art and art writing in both the Art History and Visual Culture program of the Art and Art History Department and in the Humanities Department at SJSU.

Dr. Simms is originally from Humboldt county. She studied in San Francisco and Vienna, Austria. Her masters and doctorate were completed at the University of Vienna. Her first teaching assignment took her to Cape Town, South Africa where she taught for two years at the campus for Applied Arts, University of Cape Town. After her return to Vienna she taught at the University of Vienna in the Art History department as well as Cultural Studies, at Webster University, and the University of Applied Arts. She is experienced in Museum work (having worked at several top museums in Vienna and having advised museums around the globe on their digital journey) and is currently working on completing her certificate in museums studies at Harvard extension. She is an Art Historian with an emphasis on the Viennese School, art theory, Modern and Contemporary as well as art/architecture of the Middle Ages.

Dr. Josine Eikelenboom Smits has taught surveys of Western art as well as upper division and graduate level courses in eighteenth and nineteenth century art history at California College of the Arts, Stanford University, UCBerkeley Extension and SJSU. 

She received a Master's degree in Art History from the Sorbonne (Paris IV). An internship at the Musée d’Orsay gave her an inside view of the French museum world. She earned an M.A and Ph.D from Stanford University for a dissertation on the nineteenth century French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, on whom she has lectured at the Louvre. In her research and writing she continues to illuminate Corot’s oeuvre in the broader cultural and philosophical context of Romanticism. She developed a second specialization as a research scholar at Tokyo University, where she studied the influence of Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e) on Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and the art of Van Gogh. She has lectured on Impressionist painting as well as on the aspect of Japonisme in Van Gogh’s work at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Legion of Honor).

At SJSU Dr. Josine Smits teaches upper division courses in 19th century European art, as well as in global art and visual culture with a focus on the environment (Earth Life Art). She highlights the interconnectedness between culture and the natural environment by teaching such wide-ranging topics as the indigenous arts of Australia and North America; the landscape painting of medieval China and Japan; the Zen garden and the tea ceremony. She adopts an interdisciplinary approach by tracing the growth of an ecological awareness among the landscape painters of the Romantic era in Germany, England and France, who shared common fields of interest with the scientists of their time. With hands-on projects and group discussions she encourages students to delve deeply into the environmental concerns, innovative strategies, and creative responses of artists working today.

Dr. Smits has led successful SJSU Faculty Led Programs to Paris and looks forward to continuing this program every year during Winter Break.