Celebrating Hollins Retiring Faculty 2021
Welcome!
This year, the library invited faculty who are retiring in Spring 2021 to share their work with our community.
This exhibit highlights the scholarship and creative work of three professors whose combined teaching careers at Hollins total an amazing 90 years. While the extraordinary careers of such experienced and beloved faculty cannot be fully expressed by an exhibit, the Library is still proud to celebrate with Cathy Hankla, Kathleen Nolan, and Ernie Zulia as they prepare for their next career as faculty emeriti!
Kathleen Nolan
First year at Hollins: 1985.
Favorite Hollins memory: There isn’t a single memory, but a recurring one of having a seminar with a group of advanced art history or history majors who are so knowledgeable and so confident in themselves that they run the course, and the rest of us just look on admiringly. I have had this great experience several times at Hollins, I am fortunate to say, mostly recently in Fall of 2020, my Portraiture seminar, masks and all.
Favorite place on campus: The Visual Arts Center. I am the only member of the Art Department still teaching who was involved with the planning (and fund raising) for our glorious building. Since the Trustees had just poured themselves into the beautiful Wyndham Robertson Library, the Art Department faculty was given free rein in selecting the team of architects who designed the building, and of working closely with them. It has been a great pleasure to teach in the VAC since 2004. The spaces I teach in, the seminar room VAC 112, and the lecture room, VAC 119 are a delight, and the studio spaces are unparalleled. Part of the pleasure comes from the pristine state that the building is kept in by our support staff, Yulandra Livingston, and others.
Proudest professional accomplishment: Here I have to mention two points. Of course I have been happy to have played a role in the vibrant scholarship on medieval queens for nearly two decades, but it has meant the world to me to help launch art history students into their brilliant lives beyond Hollins for more than thirty years.
Plans for retirement: Like everyone else, I hope to be able to travel before too long. I expect that I will continue to research and write, while having more time to enjoy leisure pursuits like gardening and reading British women writers.
Capetian Women by Publication Date: 2003, by Palgrave Macmillan..
This was my first book project, and it is significant to me since there had never before been a study devoted just to the royal women of the Capetian dynasty. This proved to be a useful book to a lot of historians and art historians interested in French queens, and it has been used a good deal. On a more personal note, I especially enjoyed working on this project because of the range of scholars who contributed to the volume, from Bill Jordan, at Princeton, one of the most eminent medieval historians, to several people who had just finished their dissertations. There was also one person who had come to academia late in life and was an independent scholar. She told me soon after the book was published how much it meant to her to see her work in print. Something that didn’t occur to me at the time was that two of the scholars are African American, Bill Jordan, and Afrodesia McCannon, whom I had not met, since she did not show up at the conference that was the generative event. In recent years, though, she has been a leading figure in the efforts by the Medieval Academy of America to address matters of race in medieval studies.
Queens in Stone and Silver: the creation of a visual imagery of queenship in Capetian France by Publication Date: 2009, by Palgrave Macmillan..
This one is entirely my own work. Here again I was fortunate that the book proved to have something to offer. The methodology I developed for inferring reginal agency from tombs and seals has proved to be useful for a lot of scholars who work on medieval queens. The work has gotten a good bit of recognition, and people actually tell me at conferences that it was important to them (which is all an author could ask for).
Art of the Cathedrals: Studies on Architecture, Stained Glass, and Sculpture in Memory of Anne Prache. by Publication Date: 2015, by Ashgate.Featured is chapter 12: "Filiae Hierusalem: Female Statue Columns from Notre-Dame-en-Vaux," written by Kathleen Nolan and Susan Leibacher Ward.
This is another volume of collected essays. This one was an international collaboration between French and American art historians in memory of Anne Prache, who held the most distinguished position in medieval art history in France (at Paris IV, the Sorbonne) and who was remarkably welcoming to, and encouraging of, American researchers. This project actually drove me crazy, between working with The French and certain senior American art historians who did not think they needed to listen the to editor. However, I was very glad to be part of a project in honor of the lovely Anne Prache, who was a model human being as well as scholar.
Moving Women Moving Objects (400-1500). by Publication Date: 2019, by Brill.Featured is chapter 3: "Symbolic Geography in the Tomb and Seal of Berengaria of Navarre, Queen of England" by Kathleen Nolan.
There are several things I really like about this essay. The overall collection turned out to be terrific, and I was glad to be part of it. The essay was a good lesson in accepting revision and going along with the program, since the first essay I wrote didn’t really fit the theme of the volume (we all knew this would be the case), and so I sighed and reshaped the whole thing and was happy with the result. But what I like best is that one of the co-editors, Tracy Chapman Hamilton, published what I think must have been her first article in my Capetian Women in 2003. So this is a nice example of connections among the community of scholars who work on medieval queens.
