CV

She returned to Northwestern for her MA in Art History--finding Philosophy not enfleshed enough--and went on to receive her Ph.D from the University of Chicago. The most momentous event of her doctoral studies was receiving a fellowship from the American Association of University Women enabling her to study at the Warburg Institute in London where she discovered her thesis advisor, Ernst Gombrich.
For the past 20 years, she taught at the University of Chicago and for the last decade held a University Chair.
An avowed imagist, her writing focusses on the history and theory of imaging and visualization modalities from the early modern to the digital era. Her books, in various ways, reveal the deep intersections connecting the arts, sciences, and optical technologies to one another: Geography/Geology/ Mineralogy [ featured in Voyage into Substance]; Anatomy and the Life Sciences [Body Criticism] ; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science [Echo Objects]. She also writes historically-grounded manifestos on the vital significance of the Visual and Sensory Arts to general education as well as to society at large ( Artful Science; Good Looking].

She likes to touch the earth without gloves. That is, in addition to authoring catalogues, Barbara embodies her ideas in exhibitions, such as the monumental Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen Show held at the Getty Museum (2001/2002). She also helps program-build.

Current projects include efforts to establish a laboratory/studio-based Ph.D tying together the Neurosciences with Humanities/ Social Sciences-based Imaging. [SUNY/ Buffalo] Other types of innovative programs would hopefully lead to the reconceptualization of Design Studies, both here and abroad, as Pattern-Recognition. Yet another project involves the completion of a collaborative book, A Field Guide to a New Metafield: Bridging the Humanities-Neurosciences Divide [forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press]. This volume results from the invitation to be Templeton Fellow at USC, Los Angeles, in 2008. Stafford was a Distinguished University Visiting Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology from 2010-2012.

In her spare time, Barbara loves all forms of music [opera, symphony, Jazz, Blues], contemporary poetry, hiking, treasure-hunting in flea markets, and dancing whenever possible. She still yearns for romantic travel.

Teaching Honors

University of Delaware Excellence-in-Teaching Award: 1976

Recognized by the American Society for 18th Century Studies as a Distinguished Teacher and Scholar: 2001

Society of Fellows, The University of Chicago: 2001-2007

National Grants & Honors

 

Elected or Appointed Office; National Committees; Advisory Committees

Peter Lang Publishing for the series on "Nature, Science, and the Arts.

Member, Folger Library Jubilee Readers Committee (19999 -2004)

Member of the Advisory Committee to the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1985--2000

Elected Member-at-Large of the Executive Board of the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS)

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies: Second Vice-President (1993-1994), Vice-President (1994-1995), President (1995-1996)

Member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association, 1996
Advisory and Grants Board, The Camargo Foundation, 1999-2004.

International Scientific Advisory Board, Hannover Expo 2000 (The World's Fair for the Millennium: Sections on the Future of the Past and Visions of The 21st Century)

Advisor, Visual Rhetorics Project, Calvin College (Three-year NEH funded cross Disciplinary course development project)
Chicago Round Table on the Year 2000

Advisory Board Member of American Board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Book Reviews, 2000

Advisor for Henry Art Gallery (Portland OR) project "Better Living Through Science: Contemporary Art and Human Genomics," October 2000.

Member, Advisory Board of the ASECS Book Reviews, Online project, 2000.

National Academy of Science / National Research Council, Study Project, "Information Technology and Creativity", June 2000 - December 2001,Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (Project CSTB-L-99-11A) <http://www4.nationalacademies.org/cpsma/cstb.nsf>

Planning Committee for the Congress to be held by the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA in 2003.

Member of Advisory Board, to form a new museum of the ancien Cabinet de Medailles at the Bibliotheque Nationale (Richelieu Building), Paris, France, 2004-

Exhibit and Program Advisory Committee, Body Worlds: An Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, Gunther von Hagens, Chicago, Museum of Science and Industry, February 2005.

Review Committee on Humanities, Technology and Art/Design for the 21st Century at the University of California, Berkeley (2003).

Resource Board for "Light and Mind," a five-part documentary series for PBS Television (2004 - )
Zeitschrift fuer Ideengeschichte, Advisory Board

Advisory Board for re: place [Refresh/ New Media] 2007: The Second International Conference on the Histories of Media Arts, Sciences and Technologies, Berlin October 4-7, 2007

Member, Advisory Commitee, The Species of Origin Project [Charles Darwin Bi-Centennial/2008], University of Edinburgh

Member of the Scientific Committee, Consciousness Reframed: New Realities: Being Syncretic, The Planetary Collegium's IXth International Research Conference, Vienna, Austria, 3-5 July 2008

Member of Evolution Advisory Committee, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. to advise on forthcoming on-line Symposium, Evolution and Visual Culture, March 2010.

Editorial Boards

Advisory Board of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology

Design Issues: A Journal of History, Theory, and Criticism

European Romantic Review

Intellect (Bristol, U.K.)

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment

The Semiotic Web

Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics

Technoetic Arts: an international journal of speculative research

Visio: International Journal for Visual Semiotics

Word and Image

School of Liberal Arts Advisory Board at Savannah College of Art and Design
[SCAD]

Brian Lukacher, "The Projects and Architectural Theory of Thomas Gandy" (Associate Professor, Smith College)

Christopher Johns, "The Patronage of Clement XI and the Paleo-Christian Revival" (Norman L. and Roselea Goldberg Chair of Art and Art History, Vanderbilt University).

Erin Blake, "Zograscopes, perspective prints, and the mapping of polite space in mid-eighteenth-century England", 2000, (Stanford University; BMS served as co-mentor) (Curator of Graphic Materials, Folger Library, Washington, DC)

Anna Sigridur Arnar , "Livre d'artiste, Critical Instrument, Performance: Stéphane Mallarmé and the Book." (with honors), June 2000, (Assistant Professor, Moorhead State University, MN )

Mark Hinchman, "African Rococo: Houses and Portraits in the Eighteenth-Century Senegal", August 2000, (Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska, Lincoln)

Katherine Haskins, "Informing Modernity: The Art Press and Art Reading in Early Victorian England 1830-1850" (with honors), December 2001, (Director of the Arts Library, Yale University).

Craig Ashley Hanson, "Embodying Erudition: English Art, Medicine and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism" (with honors), December 2003.

Elizabeth Liebman, "Painting Natures: Buffon and the Art of the Histoire Naturelle", December 2003.

Nancy Nield Buchwald, "Anxious Embodiments: Revenants of American Jewish Masculinities in Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross", March 2004.

Jessica Buben, "E=mc2: Image Equivalency and Pop-Metaphysics. The Pictorial as Discourse in the Atomic Age", June 2005, (Committee on the History of Culture).

Selected Recent Courses

Undergraduate

Perspectives on Imaging.

Romanticism.

Ancients and Moderns in 18th Century Art Theory.

Strange Shadows: Four Painters in Search of the Invisible

Seminars

Neuronal Aesthetics (Winter 2003): a cross disciplinary seminar integrating key problems in image history with cognitive science, neuro- and evolutionary biology, and the new philosophy of mind.

Visual Pragmatism.

Analogy: Esthetics, Rhetoric, Neurobiology.

Directed Sawyer Seminar: Computation in the Humanities.