Silverman

Debora Silverman holds the University of California President’s Chair in Modern European History, Art, and Culture at UCLA. Her books include Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America and Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style, which won the 1990 Berkshire History Prize. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellowship, and is a former Getty Scholar. Her Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Search for Sacred Art won the Emerson Prize in the Humanities and the American Historical Association prize for best book in French history and was co-winner of the 2001 PEN American Center/Architectural Digest National Prize for outstanding writing on the visual arts. She is working on two related projects: Belgian modernism and imperialism centered on the Art Nouveau Collection of the Royal Museum of Central Africa and Tervuren, Brussels; and stylistics of violence in the art of Damien Hirst.