Wednesday, 17 February 2010, 4 p.m.
Glasscock Center Library, Glasscock Building, Room 311

11th Annual Book Prize
Award Presentation and Lecture
"The Plural Temporality
of the Artwork"

CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD
Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research is pleased to announce the recipient of the 11th annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Christopher S. Wood, professor of the history of art at Yale University, receives this year’s award for his book Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art, published by The University of Chicago Press in 2008.

Jacket image: “Imperial Relics of Nuremberg.” Hand-colored woodcut, c. 1470. BM No. 1933,0102.1. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

In Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art, Wood has crafted an engrossing study of how thinking about ideas of time, art, and originality were transformed by the advent of new technologies, such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type, that made mass replication possible.  Focusing on fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Germany, Wood moves seamlessly between the history of art and the history of antiquarianism with enormous erudition.  According to Wood, the “aim of this book is to bring out the peculiar patterns of faith and skepticism generated by the material artifact.”  In teasing out such patterns, Wood incorporates an impressive array of material artifacts – monuments, tombs, prints, drawings, and tapestries – to elegantly introduce the problems he grapples with.  Wood uses the work of Conrad Celtis (1459-1508) to open questions about what people believed, and the difference between approaching objects as carriers of meaning, or approaching them as carriers of evidence of earlier societies.  Forgery, Replica, Fiction is a model of case-study scholarship. The readings of the many examples are careful, rigorous, and challenging, and Wood (almost magically) ties all his examples together in a compelling argument that challenges our notions of an original work of art and illuminates the complexity of the status of the material artifact in historical narrative.

Details for submitting books for the 12th annual book prize will be posted in early 2010.

The Glasscock Book Prize, first awarded in 1999, originated by the Texas A&M Center for Humanities Research, was permanently endowed in December 2000 by Melbern G. Glasscock '59 and his wife Susanne M. Glasscock, for whom the prize is now named.

Previous book prizes were awarded to:

Maggie Nelson

• Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007)
• Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
• Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)
• Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford University Press, 2003)
• Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)
• Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
• Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent:  Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
• Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 1999)
• Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998)

Employees of Texas A&M University are not eligible for nomination.