Bellion, Byrd, Nelson and Torbert collaborate on 'Art Follows Empire'

Together with several current and former UD students, Professor Wendy Bellion recently published a collaboratively-authored contribution to the French journal Perspective: actualité en histoire de l'art, which is published by the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (Paris). The 2015 issue of the journal offered a state-of-the- field study of the art of the United States. Wendy and a group of UD-affiliated authors (including Dana E. Byrd, Louis P. Nelson and current Ph.D. candidate Amy Torbert) contributed the following essay: "'Art Follows Empire': un état des lieux des connaissances sur l'histoire de l'art américain à ses débuts" ("'Art Follows Empire': New Scholarship in Early American Art History"). The contribution grew out of a roundtable that Bellion convened at a 2015 Society of Early Americanists conference in the U.K. called "London and the Americas." Janneken Smucker (Ph.D. 2010, History of American Civilization, University of Delaware) also published an essay in the journal.