By Anabel Costa
Congratulations go out to UC Santa Barbara’s department of History of Art and Architecture for its run of recent achievements and awards.
Claudia Moser, associate professor in History of Art and Architecture at UCSB has received the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award..
Associate professor Claudia Moser has received the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award for 2020. She has taught numerous classes on the ancient world here at UCSB from religion to art and archeology. In her courses, Moser is known for creating an engaging and interactive learning environment through activities outside the classroom such as digging up mock archeological sites by the lagoon, or re-enacting a Roman dinner party. Moser is currently focusing on research into the archeological record of Roman religion and animal sacrifice, and more specifically the shrines, temples, and altars of those rituals.
A maximum of six of these teaching awards are awarded every year, and they are reserved for those faculty members who have most prominently and creatively blended the worlds of both teaching, and scholarly work.
Another prominent member of HAA has received also recognition this year. Image Research Curator Jackie Spafford received a 2020 Foundations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant of $60,000 was given to Spafford in partnership with Sonja Sekely-Rowland, a Visual Resource Curator from UC Riverside, as well as the Society of Architectural Historians.
Jackie Spafford, Image Research Curator in UCSB’s History of Art and Architecture, is among a team who has been awarded a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to preserve architectural slide collections.
They will use the grant to launch a two-year pilot project to survey at-risk 35 mm slide collections of the built environment created from the 1960s through the mid-1990s, and held by members and partner institutions of the architecture history society. Nearly half of the grant funds are designated for fellowships and internships at both UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside.
The History of Art and Architecture department has also seen several faculty and affiliates publish books lately. Professor Volker M. Welter has a new book called Tremaine Houses: One Family’s Patronage of Domestic Architecture in Midcentury America, published by the Getty Research Institute. A graduate of HAA, Haile S. Hutterer, published a book with Penn State University Press titled Framing the Church: The Social and Artistic Power of Buttresses in French Gothic Architecture.
Anabel Costa is a third year Theater major. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.