Paul Jaskot is Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and lead convener of the Visualizing Cities Lab for 2021/22, as well as Chair of the Department. Professor Jaskot teaches courses on architectural history, modern architecture and urban planning, and German art with a particular emphasis on National Socialist Germany. His scholarly work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. He is the author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (2000) as well as The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012). He has co-edited Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (2008) as well as New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (2018). He was a founding member of the ongoing Holocaust Geography Collaborative exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze the spatial history of the Holocaust.
Sheila Dillon received a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She teaches courses on Greek and Graeco-Roman art and archaeology. Her research interests focus on portraiture and public sculpture and on reconstructing the statuary landscape of ancient cities and sanctuaries. Professor Dillon was a member of the Aphrodisias Excavations in Turkey from 1992-2004, has worked at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace, and now spends summers doing fieldwork in Athens. Her current research includes a collaborative project to publish the portrait sculpture from the Excavations in the Athenian Agora with a group of current and former students, and a digital mapping project of the history of the archaeological excavations in the Agora, a collaborative endeavor centered in the Wired! Lab that involves undergraduate and graduate students at Duke.
Gennifer Weisenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (2002), addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her second book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (2012, Japan edition, 2014), examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. She has just completed a new book on the visual culture of civil air defense in wartime Japan.
