Associate Professor
Angela Vanhaelen received her PhD in Art History in 1999 from The University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at The University of California Berkeley in 2000 before taking up a position at the University of Regina, where she taught before coming to McGill in 2003.
Professor Vanhaelen specializes in the study of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture.
Her first book, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, childhood and the city (Ashgate, 2003), explores shifts in the popular culture traditions of late seventeenth-century Amsterdam, particularly the ways that inexpensive printed imagery worked to define key urban spaces and generate new practices of everyday life.
She has recently completed a second book, The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic, which is forthcoming with Penn State University Press. This study explores the fraught relationship between art and religion after the iconoclasm, when sacred imagery was stripped from the Dutch churches. Taking up the history of painting in the aftermath of iconoclasm, the book reassesses Dutch realism and its pictorial strategies in relation to the religious and political diversity of the Dutch cities.
Professor Vanhaelen is currently working on a third book, co-edited with Joseph Ward: The Association of Space: Relations and Geographies of Early Modern Publics. This collection of essays is the second of two volumes resulting from a Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI), funded by SSHRC: "Making Publics: Media, Markets, and Association in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700," http://makingpublics.mcgill.ca. The MaPs project brings together scholars and graduate and postdoctoral students from a wide range of disciplines and geographical contexts who are working together to understand the ways in which cultural representations contributed to new forms of association before the normalization of the public sphere in the eighteenth century.
Professor Vanhaelen has published a number of articles in journals such as Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, De Zeventiende Eeuw, RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, and History of Photography
Current research projects include: Dutch garden and landscape architecture in a global context; boredom and Dutch realism; genre painting as a point of interface between private and public life.
Professor Vanhaelen's teaching overlaps with her research interests. She offers courses on early modern art and visual culture (renaissance and baroque), historiography and theory.
Graduate Seminars taught:
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2003: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life
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2004: Advanced Pro-Seminar, "Space in Art History"
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2005: Print and Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe
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2006: Iconoclasm and the Re-formation of Art
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2007: The Disenchantment of Vision
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2008: Making Publics / Producing Spaces
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2009: Boredom