Professor Sally M. Promey
American Art

Art History & Archaeology
Mail: 1211-B Art/Sociology Building
Office: 4202 Art/Sociology Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335
E-mail: smp@umd.edu

Sally M. Promey (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is a historian of American art whose research engages relationships between visual culture and religious experience. During the 2000-2001 academic year she is a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is researching the public display of religion in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present for a book titled Religion in Plain View: The Public Aesthetics of American Belief. Her recent book, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press, 1999) received this year's American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence, Historical Studies Category. In 1994 Professor Promey's monograph on Shaker visionary painting, Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana University Press, 1993), was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art. She has published articles in Art Bulletin, American Art, and American Art Journal and is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and summer research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the General Research Board of the University of Maryland. She is co-director (with Professor David Morgan, Valparaiso University) of a multi-year interdisciplinary collaborative project of research, publication, and exhibition, "The Visual Culture of American Religions," funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc. One of the products of this project, a book titled The Visual Culture of American Religions, co-edited by Promey and Morgan, is forthcoming in 2001 from the University of California Press. Promey serves on the Advisory Committee o the Archives of American Art, the Editorial Board of American Art, and represents the College Art Association on Building Blocks, an interdisciplinary project of collaboration between humanists and computer scientists, sponsored by the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage and the American Council of Learned Societies.