2023-24 Old Dominion Public Lecture Series

Bridget Alsdorf is professor of art and archaeology and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. A historian of European art from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, her work explores art’s intersections with literature, philosophy, and social theory. Her books, articles, and essays have focused primarily on nineteenth-century France. Alsdorf’s project as Old Dominion Research Professor is a book titled “Shadowed: Intimacy and Collaboration in Modern Scandinavian Art,” which explores Scandinavian painting, photography, and silent film of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s writings about marriage, interpersonal suffering, solitude, and love.

Old Dominion Research Professors contribute to the Council’s programs and events and engage the campus community in sustained discussions about their research. This cohort of senior faculty join a yearlong program designed to provide additional research time and to enhance the humanities community more broadly. They also serve as faculty fellows in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Old Dominion Professors are full professors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.