Visiting Speakers

Harold Cook takes a general interest in the history of medicine and related subjects, and in the early modern period, while his research has been mostly on the 17th century, in recent years focusing on the relationships between commerce, medicine and science in the Dutch Golden Age.

A Chicago native, Therese Cox's fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, and she was a finalist in the 2012 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. She has written online for New York Irish Arts and The Anti-Room in addition to her blog about typography and cities, Ampersand Seven. Therese is currently a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Sophie Cras (Ass. Prof., Art History, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) examines how money, finance, and economics in general became a focus for artistic experimentation since the 1960s. She has received support from institutions such as the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the German Center for the History of Art and the Ecole Française de Rome. Her writings appear in journals such as Texte zur Kunst, American Art, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne.

John Cunningham has been a lecturer in History at NUI Galway since 2004. John's principal research interest is in the moral economy of pre-Famine Ireland, to which end he is investigating conflicts about food in urban areas. 

Leon Dash, Swanlund/Center for Advanced Study Professor of Journalism, African-American Studies and Law, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist with extensive experience in domestic and international reporting. Professor Dash joined the Washington Post in 1965 and, following a two-year leave of absence as a Peace Corps high school teacher in Kenya from 1966-68, returned to an award-winning 30-year career that included living with and reporting on Angolan guerrillas, serving as West Africa bureau chief, and working at the newspaper's investigative desk.

William Deringer is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his doctorate in the History of Science from Princeton University, where his research focused on the history of economic knowledge. From 2012 -'15, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, before joining the MIT faculty in 2015.

André Dombrowski is Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research centers on the art and material culture of late nineteenth-century France and Germany. He is particularly concerned with the social and intellectual rationales behind the emergence of avant-garde painting in the 1860s and 1870s. He is presently writing a book on Impressionism’s instantaneity seen through the period’s advances in time technology.

Nina L. Dubin is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she has taught since receiving her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century French art and the author of Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010; 2012). Her work has been supported by institutions including the Getty Research Institute and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow from 2013 to 2014.