Dr. Kathryn Jasper
Dr. Jasper is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. She is a co-founder and Director of the European Studies program and teaches Latin through the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She earned her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in Medieval History. She studies approaches to rural land tenure in religious houses during Late Antiquity and through the central Middle Ages, especially in northern Italy. Dr. Jasper is also interested in how people communicated and disseminated ideas about land management. Her background in archaeology affords her a unique perspective in terms of theory and praxis, and her current project incorporates both documentary and physical evidence. At present she is completing a book on the eleventh-century monastic congregation of Fonte Avellana, located in the Italian Marches, entitled Mapping a Monastic Network: Peter Damian and Fonte Avellana in the Eleventh Century.
Dr. Lea Cline
Dr. Cline is an Associate Professor in the Wonsook Kim School of Art, Affiliate Faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies. She is currently the area coordinator for Art History and the Student Program Adviser for the U.S. Student Fulbright program. Dr. Cline is also a co-founder and Assistant Director of the European Studies program.
She earned her doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin in Ancient Art and Architecture. An active archaeologist, Dr. Cline’s research has focused on the artistic commemoration of the Roman emperors and the use of decorative, imitative surfaces in Roman imperial period houses and villas, especially pavements discovered in the Imperial villa (“Villa A” of Poppea) at Oplontis, near Pompeii in the Bay of Naples. She, along with Dr. Nathan Elkins (Baylor University), is currently at work on the Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography (expected in December 2021).
Future Faculty (Summer 2022)
Melissa Oresky
Melissa Oresky is a Professor in the Wonsook Kim School of Art where she teaches courses in painting and drawing. She earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Oresky’s collages and paintings focus on plants as subject. In addition to looking to plants for imagery, she enacts a “plantlike” process in the studio by “growing” artworks through materially active, iterative processes over long periods of time. She has exhibited her work at museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including recent shows at The Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Tripod Project Space, Busan, South Korea; and K. Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco, CA.