Judy Bullington

Biography

Dr. Judy Bullington is a Professor of Art History and served as the chair of the Department of Art at Belmont University from 2007 to 2019. She earned a Ph.D. in American Art History from Indiana University at Bloomington (1997) where she completed a dissertation titled "Expanding Horizons-The Artist-As-Traveler in the Gilded Age." She has published articles on women artists and the intersections of art and travel literature in the American Art Journal, Woman's Art Journal, Prospects, Nineteenth Century Studies, and The Gazette Des Beaux Arts, among others. In 2009, Dr. Bullington appeared on the PBS show History Detectives as the result of her research on the African-American artist Thelma Johnson Streat (1911-1959). Awards include a Fulbright to teach American art at Tartu University in Estonia, a Winterthur Research Fellowship, and an NEH Summer Institute grant to study the 19^thc. material culture of New York City at the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts. She lived and taught overseas, which included being the Acting Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Bullington was previously an Assistant Professor at Western Oregon University and a Visiting Professor at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Each semester Professor Bullington teaches two courses, a survey of art history and a special topics seminar, and, every other year offers a Maymester study abroad program in Greece. In 2013, with the support of funding from the Belmont Challenge for Innovation and Technology in Teaching, Dr. Bullington implemented a pilot project called Visual Histories in Virtual Spaces. iPads were introduced into the classroom with the aim of exploring how new technologies can be used to conceptually rethink the way students learn about the histories of art. In addition to teaching, being the faculty advisor to the student organization AHA (Art History Association), and carrying out administrative responsibilities as a department chair, Professor Bullington still maintains an active professional development schedule of scholarly research and presentations at professional conferences like CAA and SECAC.

"As an art historian, I am intrigued by the potential for 'new' narratives to emerge from studies that synthesize the visual, material, and garden histories of America during the formative years of the republic. Beneath every image lies a story and this is one not often told." An essay titled "Cultivating Meaning: The Chinese Manner in Early American Gardens (1763-1830)" is pending publication in an anthology on Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (2014). Currently, she is preparing a book manuscript on Imaging The Culture of Gardening in Early American Art, 1760-1830.