Joyce C. Polistena, Ph. D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
443 Fenwick
Office phone: 508-793-3715
jpoliste@holycross.edu
Joyce C. Polistena is Visiting Assistant Professor of art history at Holy Cross, where she is teaching courses in American Art, Modern Art and a seminar on The Visual Language of Romantic Classicism. Dr. Polistena’s research and teaching focus on European and American art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with emphasis on French Romanticism and the artist Eugène Delacroix. Her current research interests are artists’ activism and political art, as well as ongoing research about French Romanticism and Nineteenth-Century American Art. She is the author of The Religious Paintings of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863): the Initiator of the Style of Modern Religious Art, Mellen 2008.
Dr. Polistena has taught graduate and undergraduate courses tied with special exhibitions: David, Delacroix, and Revolutionary France: Drawings from the Louvre (Morgan Library, New York); Van Gogh Up Close ( Philadelphia Museum of Art), Activist Artists and Radical Art (The International Print Center, Interference Archives, New York), Art and Artists’ Anxieties: France 1888-1918 (Origins of Abstraction at MOMA, New York). Among her more recent publications are: “Scenes of 'The Passion' in Romantic Art: a Mirror of Bourgeois Ambition”, in ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art (Cascade Books); “The Image of Mary of the Miraculous Medal: A Valiant Woman” (Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide); “Nouvelles sources pour le cycle de peintures murales de Delacroix à Saint-Sulpice,” (Bulletin du Société des amis du Musée nationale Eugène Delacroix), and “The Collection in Context: The agony in the garden by Eugène Delacroix” in The Van Gogh Museum Journal. Recent conference papers are: Paris Revolution and Revelation? at Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE) and The Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King's College London (ASK); Eugène Delacroix: Modern Biblical Art (MOBIA, New York). She has organized symposia on topics of Biblical imagery in the Romantic era at The Museum of Biblical Art (New York) / The Dahesh Museum, for Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art(ASCHA) at Pratt Institute and has served on the board of ASCHA. She earned her Ph.D., M. Phil. and M.A degrees in art history from The City University of New York, a Certificate in 19th-century British History, Oxford University, UK, and a certificate in TESOL, Columbia University. She has been awarded research grants from Pratt Institute and The City University of New York.