Faculty Bookshelf
![Image of Catherine Asher's book, The New Cambridge History of India](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/c_asher_cambridge_history_india_newsize.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=OTyST1ZX)
Author: Catherine Asher
The first comprehensive study of the development and spread of architectural achievement under the Mughal emperors, this book is now required reading in South Asian art history.
![Image of Catherine Asher's book, India before Europe.](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/c_asher_india_before_europe_newsize.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=C9puWghR)
Authors: Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot
A journey across the political, religious, and cultural landscapes of medieval India 1200 to 1750, before the European intervention.
![Image of Catherine Asher's book, Perceptions of South Asia's Visual Past.](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/c_asher_southasia_visual_past_newsize.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=z_lgXkhg)
Edited by: Catherine Asher and Thomas Metcalf
These collected essays explore how attitudes toward South Asia’s visual past shaped a distinctive historical consciousness, a “canon” inextricably bound up with colonialism’s narrative.
![The front cover of Jane Blocker's book, Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/blocker_cover_design_newsize.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=yArZ_yk0)
Author: Jane Blocker
This book investigates temporality and the moving target of contemporary art history in light of artists whose works are engaged with historical subject matter, methods, and modes of inquiry.
![Cover of Jane Blocker's book, Seeing Witness](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/blocker_seeing_witness_newsize.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=_IQT265O)
Author: Jane Blocker
Challenging the implicit authority of witnessing the book examines a series of contemporary artworks that make the act of witnessing visible, and thus open to inspection and critique.
![Image of Jane Blocker's book, What the Body Cost](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/blocker_what_the_body_cost.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=J6WJI3sP)
Author: Jane Blocker
Revisiting key works in performance art the book challenges earlier critiques that characterize performance, or body art, as a purely revolutionary art form and fail to recognize its reactionary—and sometimes damaging—effects.
![Cover of Jane Blocker's book, Where is Ana Medieta?](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/blocker_where_is_ana_mendieta_newsize.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=uGUXvGxu)
Author: Jane Blocker
An in-depth critical analysis of the Cuban-born artist’s diverse body of work, considering the history of performance art, installation, and earth works, as well as feminism, multiculturalism, and postmodernism.
![Cover for the book Gifts in the Age of Empire by Sinem Casale. The cover shows depictions of people giving lined up to present gifts.](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/9780226820422.jpg?h=0eb538c9&itok=uGJ0uCjB)
Author: Sinem Casale
When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni legalism. The political, religious, and military conflicts that arose have since been widely studied, but little attention has been paid to their diplomatic relationship. Sinem Arcak Casale here sets out to explore these two major Muslim empires through a surprising lens: gifts.
![Image of Michael Gaudio's book, The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/gaudio_bible_and_the_printed_image_cover.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=TwA-KyS0)
Author: Michael Gaudio
This book examines the visual culture of print in 17th-century England through the lens of hand-made bible concordances composed by the Ferrar-Collet women of Little Gidding.
![Image of Michael Gaudio's book, Engraving the Savage](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/gaudio_engraving_the_savage_copy.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=vpIFu7ah)
Author: Michael Gaudio
This book analyzes how the craftmanship of popular engravings of Native American Indians defined the nature of Western civilization by producing an image of its “savage other” and shaping Western responses to indigenous peoples.
![Book Cover of "Sound, Image, Silence" by Micheal Guadio](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/1f4b073ddbcb0890cfb12feb0b9619d6.png?h=bd97a7b8&itok=lTWuStQ8)
Author: Michael Gaudio
This book explores the role that aural imagination played in representations of the New World. It gives us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.
![Book Cover of Color in the Age of Impressionism by Laura Anne Kalba](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/kalba_book.jpg?h=215875e6&itok=Vu80KknD)
Author: Laura Anne Kalba
This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumière brothers’ perfection of the autochrome color photography process.
![Image of Jennifer Marshall's book, Machine Art, 1934](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/marshall_machine_art.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=BebXh5xO)
Author: Jennifer Marshall
This winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award tells the history of the popular but controversial show of machine parts and products at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, produced in the climate of the interwar period and the Great Depression.
![Image of Steven Ostrow's book, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/ostrow_art_spirituality.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=oLSvrt5R)
Author: Steven Ostrow
An interdisciplinary study of two of the most complex public monuments built in the papal capital during the Counter-Reformation and an interpretive reading of their artistic programs.
![Image of Steven Ostrow's book, L'arte Dei Papi](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/ostrow_arte_dei_papi.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=CxEQYUTa)
Author: Steven Ostrow
An original and detailed analysis of the historical significance of papal policy in the field of architecture and figurative art, relying in particular on the example of Santa Maria Maggiore.
![Image of Steven Ostrow's book, Bernini's Biographies](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/ostrow_bernini.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=ajtdldXE)
Edited by: Steven Ostrow et al.
This essay collection by historians of art and literature marks the first sustained examination of the two biographies, first and foremost as texts.
![Image of Steven Ostrow's book, Perspectives on Roman Baroque Sculpture](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/ostrow_critical_perspectives_on_roman_baroque_sculpture.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=-fvxW-ax)
Edited by: Steven Ostrow et al.
This book stakes out a new frontier of research on 17th-century sculpture in Rome, looking beyond questions of technique and attribution to focus instead on questions of historical context and criticism.
![Image of Robert Silverman's book, American Photography: A Century of Images](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/silberman_american_photography_copy.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=ThxRI2Jb)
Authors: Vicky Goldberg, Robert Silberman, and Garrett White
This companion book to the PBS series considers some of the 20th century's best-known photographs, examining the diverse roles photography has played in shaping our lives.
![Image of Gabriel Weisberg's book, Redefining Genre](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/weisberg-refining_genre.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=JJgMkOii)
Author: Gabriel Weisberg
This catalogue for an exhibition from a French museum examines the period’s developments in genre painting, including subjects, influences, and techniques.
![Image of Gabriel Weisberg's book, Japanomania in the Nordic Countries, 1875–1918](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/weisberg_japanomania.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=V0ofkDnC)
Edited by: Gabriel Weisberg et al.
This study of Japanese influence on the visual arts in Scandinavia reveals how widespread interest in Japanese aesthetics helped to establish notions of a fundamental unity between the arts.
![Image of Gabriel Weisberg's book, Illusions of Reality](/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/styles/teaser_image_portrait/public/unsorted/images/weisberg_illusions_of_reality_copy.jpg?h=99f9538e&itok=Kzq5H8tx)
Author: Gabriel Weisberg
This book traces Naturalism's development and relationship between different art forms, paying attention to the way artists used Naturalism as a vehicle for understanding the lives of ordinary people at a time of great social transformation.