Renée Ater, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Maryland
American Art

Anthony Colantuono, Associate Professor
Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University
Seventeenth-Century Italian, French, and Spanish Art

Meredith J. Gill, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Princeton University
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art

June Hargrove, Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Nineteenth-Century European Painting and Sculpture

Shannen Hill, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
African Art

Jason Kuo, Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Chinese Art

Steven A. Mansbach, Professor
Ph.D. Cornell University
Twentieth-Century Art

Abigail McEwen, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Latin American Art

William L. Pressly, Professor and Chair
Ph.D. New York University
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art

Joshua Shannon, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Contemporary Art History & Theory

Yui Suzuki, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles
Japanese Art

Marjorie S. Venit, Professor and Director of Academic Programs
Ph.D. New York University
Ancient Mediterranean Art History & Archaeology

Alicia Volk, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. Yale University
Japanese Art

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Professor
Ph.D. Harvard University
Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art

Distinguished Affiliates

Franklin Kelly
Ph.D. University of Delaware
American Art

Richard Spear
Ph.D. Princeton University
Italian Baroque Art

Emeriti and Adjunct Faculty

Up Down

Shannen Hill
African Art

Office: 4220 Art-Sociology Building

Email: shill@umd.edu

Telephone: (301) 405-7720

Shannen Hill specializes in South African art with research interests in political rhetoric and visual culture, modern and contemporary art, and post-colonial theory. Her forthcoming book, Biko and Black Consciousness in South African Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press), is scheduled for release in 2013. Her most significant publications include Trauma and Representation: Imaging Violence in Africa , a special issue of African Arts that she co-edited and in which her article “Iconic Autopsy: Postmortem Portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko” appears (MIT Press, 2005), and “Minkisi do not die: BaKongo Cosmolopgy in the Christian Rituals of Simon Kimbangu and Simon Mpadi,” a chapter in Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-Cultural Perspective (Berg Publishers, 2000). Other publications focus on South African and American artists; one of these “Robert Colescott and Glenn Ligon: Confronting Caricature and Stereotype” (University of Denver, 2004) will be reprinted in Collage (University of Texas-Austin) in 2011.

Professor Hill's undergraduate courses survey arts of the African continent and African-inflected arts within the Atlantic diaspora. Graduate courses emphasize theory and have thus far focused on South Africa, post-colonial approaches to arts of the African continent, diasporic / transnational studies, and globalization.

Dr. Hill's research has been supported by the Getty Foundation and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg , among others. She has lived and worked in South Africa for three years. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. Before coming to Maryland in 2006, she was Assistant Professor and Gallery Director at the University of Denver for five years, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses.

Complete publications