Catherine Dossin

Associate Professor of Art History

Catherine Dossin is Associate Professor of Art History at Purdue University and Editor of the Artl@s Bulletin. Originally from France, she received a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Routledge, 2015), the co-editor with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel of Circulations in the Global History of Art (Routledge, 2015), the co-author with Lynn Boland of Louise Blair Daura: A Virginian in Paris (University of Georgia, 2017), and the editor of France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2018). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled French Images of America in the Age of Revolutions, 1760s-1820s: The Visual and Global History of a Colonial Mirage.

At Purdue University, she teaches courses on Western Modern and Contemporary Art, Latin American Art, Women Artists, and Global Art.

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Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler

Associate Professor of Design History

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler is an Associate Professor of Design History and Chair of the Department of Art and Design in the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance. Her 2021 book Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office focuses on the material, political, social, and technological problems that workers and organizations encountered as the open plan transformed from a progressive design solution into a mainstream design concept in the late 20^th century. In addition to her monograph, Dr. Kaufmann-Buhler is also the author of a number of articles in prominent journals that have explored various topics from the care of office plants to the design interface of cubicles and computers. She was the co-editor of Design History Beyond the Canon, a collection which was developed out of an NEH summer institute (2015) at Drexel University which explored non-canonical approaches to teaching the history of design. In addition to her writing, Dr. Kaufmann-Buhler’s research has been featured in mainstream publications and media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Scientific American, New York Magazine, and the BBC. She earned her PhD in Design Studies from the University of Wisconsin Madison, her MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and her BA in American Culture from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.  [read more]

Beth Woodward

Assistant Professor of Practice in Art History

Beth Woodward is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Art and Design and is affiliated with the Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program. A specialist in the history of art and architecture of the European Middle Ages, Beth holds a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago, a Master’s degree in art history from Florida State University, and undergraduate degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Prior to joining Purdue, Beth served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture at Bates College in Maine (2019-2023) and at Lake Forest College in Illinois (2018-1019). Her teaching interests include early and late medieval art, Romanesque and Gothic architecture, the arts of the Islamic world, art and exchange in the global Middle Ages, the arts of the book, theories and methods of art history, and representations of the afterlife.

Beth’s research focuses on the material culture of medieval romance, particularly illuminated vernacular manuscripts and the intersection of artistic and literary practices during the later Middle Ages. This research has been supported by grants from the University of Chicago and the Mellon Council on Library & Information Resources. Her most recent publication focuses on the iconography of illuminated Roman de la Rose manuscripts, which appears in Approaches to Teaching the Romance of the Rose (MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature, 2023).

Allie Brandt

Lecturer of Art History

Allie Brandt is an Art History Lecturer and an Independent Curator. She received her B.A. in Art History from Purdue University with a minor in Anthropology. In between her Undergraduate and Graduate studies she worked at the IMA (now Newfields) and Ripley Auction House in Indianapolis. She then went on to receive her M.A in Fine and Decorative Arts from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London where she wrote her Master's Thesis on the symbolic meaning of armor in Elizabethan portraiture. Upon her return to the United States she has curated several exhibitions including The Unseen World of Charles Altamont Doyle and John Ruskin and his “Frenemies” at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino California, as well as She Contains Multitudes for the Purdue Galleries. Professor Brandt predominantly teaches the Art History Survey of Western Art from 1400 to Present. Her research interests are eclectic and change with each project however she approaches each project through an object-based and interdisciplinary lens. Her current project explores the material culture of mid nineteenth-century American homes with a particular focus on ephemera, craft, keepsakes, and home adornment.