Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Lecture Series is an annual program of monthly lectures in art history sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Endowed with a bequest from Linda Bettman, a former graduate student of the department, the lectures are named in her honor.
Lectures take place in-person at 6:15 PM ET (New York) in lecture hall 612 in Schermerhorn Hall on Columbia's Morningside Campus. All Bettman lectures are open to the public and are followed by a reception.
The Bettman Lecture Series is coordinated by two graduate students, serving on a committee with two faculty members, who act in an advisory role. These are volunteer positions designed to foster community and intellectual engagement within the department. The series is intended to be a student-run initiative and the selection of student members is in the hands of the serving graduate students. (For information on how to become a Bettman series coordinator, please see here.)

Bettman Lecture Series: Inauguration of the Bettman Lectures, Film screening, La Leçon de Meyer Schapiro
Bettman Lecture Series: Jeffry Hamburger, "'The various writings of humanity': A Sermon by Johannes Tauler on Hildegard of Bingen's 'Liber Scivias'"
Bettman Lecture Series: T. J. Clark, "The Sabine Women and Lévi-Strauss"
Bettman Lecture Series: Margaret Olin, "The Presence of Photographs"
Bettman Lecture Series: Joseph Koerner, "Bosch's Enmity"
Bettman Lecture Series: Jacqueline Lichtenstein, "The Philosopher and the Art Historian: An Impossible Dialogue? Meyer Schapiro's Response to Heidegger's Text on Van Gogh"
Bettman Lecture Series: Lothar Ledderose, "Finding Spaces: Strategies of the Commentator in Chinese Art"
Bettman Lecture Series: Anson Rabinbach, "Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Hitler-Terror and the Reichstag Fire Conspiracy"
Bettman Lecture Series: Irene Winter
Bettman Lecture Series: Monica Juneja, "University of Heidelberg Ordering the World as Image — Narration and Communication in Art from the Mughal Courts"
Bettman Lecture Series: Howard Bloch, "The Bayeux Tapestry and the Ends of History"
Bettman Lecture Series: Timon Screech, "The Voyage of the 'New Year's Gift': A Cargo of Paintings from London to Japan, 1614"
Bettman Lecture Series: Alexander Nagel, "Anthropologies of the Image, ca. 1500"
Bettman Lecture Series: James Elkins, "Is Art History Global?"
Bettman Lecture Series: Howard Burns
Bettman Lecture Series: Geoffrey Batchen, "Analog: Another History of Photography"
Bettman Lecture Series: Andrew Robison, "The Marriage of Venice and Rome"
Bettman Lecture Series: Paul Binski, "'Working by Words Alone': French Architects, Scholasticism and the Professions in the Later 13th Century"
Bettman Lecture Series: Stephen Campbell, "Andrea Mantegna circa 1450: Imitation and the Force of Images"
Bettman Lecture Series: Brigid Doherty, "Cézanne, and the Origins of Introjection"
Bettman Lecture Series: Gerhard Wolf
Bettman Lecture Series: Jennifer Roberts, "Pictures in Transit"
Bettman Lecture Series: Tim Barringer
Bettman Lecture Series: Alexander Nemerov, "The Aesthetics of Abraham Lincoln"
Bettman Lecture Series: Jean Michel Massing, "The Image of Mediterranean Slavery in the Seventeenth Century"
Bettman Lecture Series: Eve Blau, "Transparency: Architecture and the Contradictions of Modernity in the 1920s"
Bettman Lecture Series: Cecelia Klein, "Los Angeles Death in the Hands of Strangers: Aztec Sacrifice in the Western Imagination, 1521-2006"
Bettman Lecture Series: Victor Stoichita
Bettman Lecture Series: Gregory Levine, "The Faltering Brush: Chan/Zen Death Verse Calligraphies and the Master's Graphical 'Vanishing Point'"
Bettman Lecture Series: Andrea Giunta, "Conspiracy & Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Imageries of Institutional Destabilization"
Bettman Lecture Series: Wu Hung, "Shitao (1642-1707) and the Traditional Chinese Conception of Ruins"
Bettman Lecture Series: Susan Alcock
Bettman Lecture Series: Mitchell Merback, "Why Nobody's Freedom is Depicted in Hans Sebald Beham's Impossible"
Bettman Lecture Series: Sarah McPhee
Bettman Lecture Series: Robert Bagley, "Gombrich among the Egyptians: The History of Art as a Contest between Seeing and Knowing"
Bettman Lecture Series: Thierry de Duve, "Joseph Beuys and the German Past, Tentatively"
Bettman Lecture Series: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, "Boucher's Interiority"
Bettman Lecture Series: Rosalind Blakesley, "Ladies-in-Waiting in Waiting: the Portraiture of Adolescence in Eighteenth-Century Russia"
Bettman Lecture Series: Patricia L. Rubin, "Pisanello's Topknot: Facing up to Fifteenth-century Portraiture"
Bettman Lecture Series: Christopher Wood, "The Uninvited"
Bettman Lecture Series: Yukio Lippit, "Ito Jakuchu's Colorful Realm of Living Beings"
Bettman Lecture Series: Tonio Hölscher, "Penelope in Persepolis: Or The Power of Images to Stop War with an Arch-Enemy"
Bettman Lecture Series: Ann Bermingham, "Making Motion Pictures in 18th-century London: Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon"
Bettman Lecture Series: Maria Gough, "Radical Tourists in Soviet Photographic Utopia"
Bettman Lecture Series: Jas Elsner, "Green Curtains and Picture Covers: Towards an Archaeology of Pictorial Closet"
Bettman Lecture Series: David Morgan, "Likeness and Iconicity in Modern Images of Jesus"
Bettman Lecture Series: Simon Gikandi, "Rethinking the Popular Arts in a Global World"
Bettman Lecture Series: John Pinto, "Architecture and the Representation of Power: Filippo Juvarra in a European Perspective"
Bettman Lecture Series: Julian Stallabrass, "Elite Art in an Age of Populism"
Bettman Lecture Series: Carolyn Dean, "Building Meaning: Significance in Inka Stonemasonry"
Bettman Lecture Series: Georges Didi-Huberman, "Film, Politics, and Poetry: On Pier Paolo Pasolini"
Bettman Lecture Series: Griselda Pollock, "Raphael After the Holocaust: When and Where is History in Art?"
Bettman Lecture Series: Erika Naginski, "Impossible Design: Porsenna's Tomb and French Visionary Architecture"
Bettman Lecture Series: Finbarr Barry Flood, "Sanctified Sandals: Relics of the Prophet in an Era of Technological Reproduction"
Bettman Lecture Series: Kirk Savage, "The Corpse and the Name: Alexander Gardner and the Origins of the Modern War Memorial"
Bettman Lecture Series: Paul Crossley, "The Myth of the Cathedral"
Bettman Lecture Series: Luke Syson, "Sculpting the Immaterial in Fifteenth Century Italy"
Bettman Lecture Series: Lina Bolzoni, "Memory Palaces: the Renaissance and the Contemporary World"
Bettman Lecture Series: Marc Gotlieb, "Imitation is Suicide: Teacher-Student Disasters in Nineteenth-Century Art"
Bettman Lecture Series: Jesús Escobar, "Lost Madrid: The Royal Palace of the Spanish Habsburgs"
CANCELLED: Bettman Lecture Series: Charles Barber, "Whose Modernism? El Greco and Art's History"
Bettman Lecture Series: Etienne Jollet, "Chardin's Objects: Proprieties, Properties, Possessions."
Bettman Lecture Series: Bernhard Siegert, "The Figural Line: Sewing, Knotting, Weaving, and Inscribing the Surface 1450 – 1650"
Bettman Lecture Series: Julia Bryan-Wilson, "Public Labors"
Bettman Lecture Series: Charles Barber, "Reading an Icon of the Black Mohammed: Georgios Klontzas and Islam"
Bettman Lecture Series: Mary Miller, "The Trouble with 864: Maya Art of the Late 9th Century"
Bettman Lecture Series: Huey Copeland, "In the Shadow of the Negress"
Bettman Lecture Series: Michael Ann Holly, "The Back of the Painted Beyond"
Bettman Lecture Series: Kavita Singh, "Frictional Heritage: Museums between Cultures"
Bettman Lecture Series: Stephen J. Campbell, "Against Titian"
Bettman Lecture Series: John Durham Peters, "A Short Media History of Clouds"
Bettman Lecture Series: Liz Diller, "Unfinished Business"
Bettman Lecture Series: Frank Fehrenbach, "Materiality, Factual and Actual: The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture"
Bettman Lecture Series: Dagmar Schäfer, "Dynastic Knowledge and the Knowledge of Dynasties: Politics and the History of Scientific Change in China"
Bettman Lecture Series: Whitney Davis, "Hegel's 'Symbolic Art' and Cosmological Perspectivism"
Bettman Lecture Series: Ping Foong, "On the authority of painters at the Song dynasty court"
Bettman Lecture Series: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, "Ingres's Creoles"
Bettman Lecture Series: Alessandro Nova, "Grace, Splendor, and Terribilità in the Art Theory of the 16th Century"
Bettman Lecture Series: Caroline van Eck, "The Material Presence of Absent Antiquities: Collecting Excessive Objects and the Revival of the Past"
Bettman Lecture Series: Kishwar Rizvi, "Mosque/Museum: Religious history and 'soft culture' in the UAE and Qatar."
Bettman Lecture Series: Nancy Steinhardt, "Shoroon Bumbagar"
Bettman Lecture Series: Steven Nelson, "Learning from Johannesburg: Moshekwa Langa’s Maps of Desire"
Bettman Lecture Series: Clara Bargellini, "Samuel Stradanus: How Engraving Began in the New World"
Bettman Lecture Series: Charmaine Nelson, "Enslaved Black Females in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements"
Bettman Lecture Series: Christine Mehring, "Material Matters"
CANCELLED: Bettman Lecture Series: Valentin Groebner, "Visualizing the Absence of Dirty Things. Images of Purity, medieval and modern"
Bettman Lecture Series: Robert Nelson, “A Byzantine Icon in Medieval Thessaloniki and Renaissance Rome”
Bettman Lecture Series: Erica James, "After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary"
Bettman Lecture Series: Erica James, "After Caliban: Caribbean Art in the Global Imaginary"
Bettman Lecture Series: Deborah Howard, “Venice and the Sea”
Bettman Lecture Series: Stanley Abe, “Imagining Sculpture”
CANCELLED: Bettman Lecture Series: Mary Roberts, “Benjamin, Poe and the Rank Orient of the Nineteenth-Century Interior”
CANCELLED: Bettman Lecture Series: Gülru Necipoğlu, "Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Empire: Arts, Politics, and Commerce in the Construction of the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman's Magnificence”
Bettman Lecture Series: Pamela M. Lee, "Lying in the Gallery"
Bettman Lecture Series: Timothy Hyde, "The Building Site, Redux"
Bettman Lecture Series: Temi Odumosu, "Refusing Subjects: Ethical Lessons from Colonial Images"
Bettman Lecture Series: Chika Okeke-Agulu, "On Restitution and the Art Industry"
POSTPONED: Bettman Lecture Series: Mary Roberts, “Benjamin, Poe and the Rank Orient of the Nineteenth-Century Interior”
Bettman Lecture Series: Irene Small, “Circling Black Square: Discovery Against Invention”
Bettman Lecture Series: Mary Roberts, "Benjamin, Poe and the Rank Orient of the Nineteenth-Century Interior"
Bettman Lecture Series: Sheila Dillon, "The Portrait Statuary from the Library of Pantainos Complex in the Athenian Agora: Dealing with Legacy Material"
Bettman Lecture Series: Mario Bevilacqua, "Maps, Trees of Knowledge and Encyclopedias: Cartography of Rome in the 17th and 18th Centuries"
Bettman Lecture Series: Erin Thompson, “Kingdom Under Glass: Repatriation of Nepali Sacred Art”
Bettman Lecture Series: Dorothy Wong, “First Images of the Buddha: the Case of Udayana Buddha Statues”
Bettman Lecture Series: Sarah Lewis, “Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law”
Bettman Lecture Series: Laura Filloy Nadal, 'Luxury Materials in Fifteenth-Century Aztec Shields: Creation and Circulation'
Bettman Lecture Series: Matthew Canepa, 'Perso-Iranian Visual and Material Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World'
Bettman Lecture Series: Rebecca VanDiver, 'How to Design a New Tradition: Placemaking in the Art and Career of Loïs Mailou Jones'
Bettman Lecture: Elina Gertsman, 'Hileq and Bileq Drink Their Share: Wrathful Rites in a Medieval Haggadah'
Bettman Lecture: Olivier Lugon, 'From “books of light” to the “total image”: publishing industry, slide projection and the rise of “immersive exhibitions” in France in the 1960s-1970s'
Bettman Lecture: Ivan Foletti, 'Decolonizing the Late Antique South Caucasus: Images, Performances and Experiences'
CANCELLED: Bettman Lecture: Dana Leibsohn, 'Christ Becomes a Codex: Making and Unmaking Colonial Objects in Mexico'
Bettman Lecture: Denise Murrell, 'The New Negro Artist and The Modern Black Subject: Debate and Synthesis'
Bettman Lecture: Alina Payne, 'From Frozen Water to Wax and Honey: Architecture as Nature in the Renaissance'
Bettman Lecture: Gennifer Weisenfeld
Bettman Lecture: Itohan Osayimwese
Bettman Lecture: Christine Ho
Bettman Lecture: Margaret Graves












