Maurizio Forte, Ph.D., is a William and Sue Gross distinguished Professor of Classical Studies Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Bass Chair and Director and founder of the DIG@Lab at Duke University. His main research topics are: classical archaeology, digital archaeology, and neuro-archaeology. He was a professor of World Heritage at the University of California, Merced, (School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts) and Director of the Virtual Heritage Lab. He was Chief of Research at CNR (Italian National Research Council) of “Virtual Heritage: integrated digital technologies for knowledge and communication of cultural heritage through virtual reality systems.”
Kristin Love Huffman is a Lecturing Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Her current research focuses on the uses, configurations, and, at times, deliberate re-ordering of architectural spaces and larger urban systems in Early Modern Venice. This is the central topic of her monograph: Visual Rhetoric and Spatial Dynamics in Early Modern Venice. Her interest in urban experiences and reconstructing transformed or demolished spaces led her to work with Wired! at Duke as well as Visualizing Venice beginning in 2013. Within these collaboratives, she contributed to the curation of the exhibition, Water and Food in Venice at the Ducal Palace in 2015. From 2014-2017, she worked to create the exhibition, A Portrait of Venice: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of 1500, on display at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke (September 2017-January 2018). In conjunction with the exhibition, she organized a scholarly symposium, “Stories about Venice and de’ Barbari’s Marvelous View of 1500.” The research conducted for the exhibition, along with the talks first presented at the symposium, formed the foundation for an edited volume that includes over 20 scholarly essays related to the View of Venice and life in Early Modern Venice (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2021). She is currently working with colleagues at the Correr Museum in Venice, Italy, to feature an expanded version of the 2017-2018 exhibition, A Portrait of Venice, as an installation centered on the woodcut along with the original wooden blocks used to publish the View in 1500. Most recently, she collaborated with Duke Library’s Rubenstein Library for an interactive virtual exhibition featuring digital stories related to the map of Venice by Ludovico Ughi, first printed in 1729 (https://sites.duke.edu/sensesofvenice/). The exhibition, The Senses of Venice, was co-curated with Bradford Lewis.
Paul Jaskot is a Professor of Art History and Director of the Wired Lab for Digital Art History & Visual Culture. His scholarship has addressed the political history of modern architecture, with an emphasis on the impact of the cultural policy during Nazi Germany. He has also published on and taught for over two decades topics related to Chicago architecture and urbanism.
Shambhavi Kaul’s cinematic constructions conjure uncanny, science-fictive non-places. Described as creating “zones of compression and dispersion,” her work utilizes strategies of montage and recirculation, inviting an affective response while simultaneously measuring our capacity to know what we encounter. She has exhibited her work worldwide at venues such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, The New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Edinburgh International Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and solo shows at Jhaveri Contemporary, in Mumbai.
Mark J.V. Olson is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Visual & Media Studies at Duke University. He teaches courses on media (new and old—theory, practice, and history) and medicine and visual culture. As an extension of his past work with the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media & Learning Initiative, he collaborates on the development of a new interdisciplinary project that connects the study of the material culture of art history, architecture, and archaeology with new media modes of representation and visualization. Olson is the former Director of New Media & Information Technologies for HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences & Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary & International Studies.
Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. He studied at Morehouse College and Howard University before earning his doctorate in art history at Yale University. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997 & 2002), and Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008), Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014), and Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020)
Victoria Szabo is Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. She is also the Program Director for Information Science + Information Studies, the Director of Graduate Studies for the MA in Digital Art History/Computational Media, and the Director of the Duke Digital Humanities Initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Co-Director of the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. She is also co-lead of the Bass Connections Information, Society & Culture theme. She is former co-Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute’s GreaterThanGames Lab. Her interests are in digital media and cultures, in theory and in practice. Her current projects focus on spatial and augmented reality technologies such as interactive maps, virtual worlds, games, and hybrid reality systems, and how they can be applied to humanities teaching and research. She is also interested in the digital remediation of historic archives and exhibitions, and is a member of the Visualizing Venice consortium, as well as a partner on the NC Jukebox and Digital Durham projects. She co-creates media art projects with Psychasthenia Studio and also Chair’s the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester and worked as a professional academic technology developer at Stanford before coming to Duke in 2006.
Ed Triplett is a Lecturing Fellow in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. He received a Ph.D. in Art and Architectural History from the University of Virginia in 2015. He also has an MFA in 3D Modeling and Animation from Savannah College of Art and Design, and an M.A. in History & Museum Studies from the University of Delaware. His dissertation focused on fortress-monasteries and castles occupied by Iberia’s military-religious orders, and he continues pursuing his two main interests: medieval architecture and historical and cultural visualization. Ed teaches courses on historical mapping, medieval castles, and Gothic cathedrals. He is working on a book manuscript about the role castles played in the formation of borders in Medieval Iberia. His publications include an article about his current Wired! project, “The Book of Fortresses in Creating Place in Early Modern European Architecture” (2021), a chapter in Digital Methods and Remote Sensing in Archaeology discussing historical uses of photogrammetry and 2D and 3D viewshed analysis (2016), and an article for a special issue of Historical Geography discussing architectural projections of power and influence on medieval Iberia’s fluctuating frontier (2017). Triplett originally came to Duke as a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow tasked with data curation for visual studies in 2015, and he continues to work with the Wired! Lab and other digital scholarship groups on campus. His collaborative digital project seeks to spatially reconstruct The Book of Fortresses—a bound collection of perspective drawings and plans of 58 castles on the border between the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain in 1509-1510.
Augustus E. Wendell is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. He has been a faculty member there since 2019. Augustus completed his MFA in Computer Art at The School of Visual Arts and his undergraduate studies at Northeastern University. Augustus has held appointments at Parsons the New School for Design, The New York School of Interior Design, Virginia Tech and the New Jersey Institute of Technology where he was program coordinator for the Digital Design program. Augustus researches the application of computational processes to design, fine art and historical research. He has a concentration in the application of image and model based workflows to aid in the study of complex geographic and spatial conditions.
Annabel Jane Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History, Duke University, has served as Harry Porter V
isiting Professor at the School of Architecture of the University of Virginia and Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at the Yale University School of Architecture. Her early research focused on Late Ancient culture: Art of Empire (Penn State), Tokali Kilise (Harvard), Refiguring the Post-Classical City (Cambridge). With Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago), she began to investigate the effects of modernity on ancient landscapes. Her later work combines her pre-Modern and Modern interests: Selling Jerusalem (Chicago); Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings (Minnesota); Models: Bodies, Buildings, Black Boxes (Virginia, 2021).
