Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman 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 in the fall will take place as live webinars at the customary time of 6:15 pm ET (New York), except for the lecture given by Professor Mario Bevilacqua, who will be presenting from Florence, Italy at 12 pm ET (New York), January 31st. We intend to hold spring lectures in person at 610 Schermerhorn, pending potential travel and safety restrictions.
Bettman webinars are open to the public, but only registered attendees will be able to access the event. Links to register for each talk will be posted below; after filling out a short form, you will receive a link via email enabling you to participate as an attendee.
The Bettman 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: T. J. Clark, "The Sabine Women and Lévi-Strauss"
Bettman Lecture Series: Margaret Olin, "The Presence of Photographs"
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: Geoffrey Batchen, "Analog: Another History of Photography"
Bettman Lecture Series: Andrew Robison, "The Marriage of Venice and Rome"
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: 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: Wu Hung, "Shitao (1642-1707) and the Traditional Chinese Conception of Ruins"
Bettman Lecture Series: Mitchell Merback, "Why Nobody's Freedom is Depicted in Hans Sebald Beham's Impossible"
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: Patricia L. Rubin, "Pisanello's Topknot: Facing up to Fifteenth-century Portraiture"
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: 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: 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: 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: John Durham Peters, "A Short Media History of Clouds"
Bettman Lecture Series: Frank Fehrenbach, "Materiality, Factual and Actual: The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture"
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: Alessandro Nova, "Grace, Splendor, and Terribilità in the Art Theory of the 16th Century"
Bettman Lecture Series: Kishwar Rizvi, "Mosque/Museum: Religious history and 'soft culture' in the UAE and Qatar."
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: 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"
CANCELLED: 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: Erin Thompson, “Kingdom Under Glass: Repatriation of Nepali Sacred Art”
Bettman Lecture Series: Sarah Lewis, “Groundwork: Race and Aesthetics in the Era of Stand Your Ground Law”










