Humanities on the Hill: Why the Museum Matters with Dan Weiss and Jennifer Kingsley

Description

Daniel H. Weiss, professor of the humanities at Johns Hopkins and president emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Jennifer Kingsley, associate teaching professor and director of museums and society at Johns Hopkins, will be in conversation about "Why the Museum Matters" as part of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute's Humanities on the Hill series, in partnership with East City Bookshop.

About the Speakers:

Daniel Weiss is a Homewood professor of the humanities at Johns Hopkins University and president emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Weiss was previously president and professor of art history at Haverford College and, from 2005 to 2013, at Lafayette College. He holds an MBA from Yale University and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in medieval art, where he joined the art history faculty and in six years rose to full professor and then chair of the department. Three years later, he became the James B. Knapp Dean of Johns Hopkins's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

The author of seven books and numerous articles, Weiss has published and lectured widely on a variety of topics, including the art of the Middle Ages and the Crusades, higher education, museums, and American culture. Earlier in his career, Weiss spent four years as a management consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in New York.

Weiss received the Business and Society Award from the Yale School of Management, the Van Courtlandt Elliott Award from the Medieval Academy of America, both the Monumental Alumni Award and the Distinguished Alumni Award from George Washington University, and he was inducted into the Society of Scholars at Johns Hopkins in 2018. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, Weiss is vice chair of the board of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, vice chair of the Library of America, a member of the University Council at Yale, and a trustee of the Wallace Foundation and the Posse Foundation.

Jennifer Kingsley is an educator, scholar, and curator. In 2011, she joined the Program in Museums and Society. She built a robust and diverse curriculum that prioritizes applied learning and publicly engaged research developed in partnership with Baltimore's memory and culture keepers. Jennifer contributes actively to the Engaged Art History community of practice.

Kingsley specializes in the arts of the Middle Ages, considering both the historical moment of their making and their afterlives as part of different processes and cycles of collection, interpretation, and display. "The medieval world has been reinvented many times—as inspirational, nationalist, primitive, and nativist—its material culture juxtaposed in both productive and problematic ways with African and modern art. Such changing narratives surface art history's competing canons and the institutional actors who craft them. Those narratives and actors have become a central focus of my research, teaching, and practice."