Mary O'Neill

Mary O'Neill is an art historian and art appraiser based in Washington. She lectures on various aspects of art history in locations around the world, such as Art Basel in Miami, the Chautauqua Institute in New York, and dozens of international cities for Smithsonian Journeys. Mary has published articles in several national publications, including the Smithsonian Magazine cover story Virtue and Beauty: The Renaissance Image of the Ideal Woman.  

Lisa Passaglia Bauman

Lisa Passaglia Bauman is an art historian of the Italian Renaissance and professor of Art History at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. A recipient of the university’s Teaching Excellence Award, she is consistently praised for her ability to turn students’ required course in the Arts into one of their favorite experiences at the university.  She earned her Ph.D. at Northwestern University, and her scholarly publications focus on cardinals as patrons in late fifteenth-century Rome and the elaborate rhetoric of patronage of the della Rovere family.  She has been the Academic Director for George Mason’s Semester program in Florence, Italy, and at Oxford University in England, and she currently runs two study abroad programs for the university: Art and Memory in Rome and Florence, a summer program that explores the classical world of ancient Rome and its rebirth in the Renaissance, and From Roman to Parisian: Shaping the Urban Experience in France from Antiquity to the Modern Period, a winter course in urban design. Before coming to George Mason, Professor Bauman worked in the Department of Museum Education at the Art Institute of Chicago where she developed and presented gallery walks and public lectures on the permanent collection and special exhibitions.  Her years of lecturing in front of the art work have informed her teaching as she strives to engage her students more intimately with the object, its history and its cultural context. 

Christopher Brennan

Christopher Brennan, guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic, is a historian specialized in Central and Eastern Europe with a particular interest in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Germany and the history of the Czechs. Though British, he grew up in south-western France. He obtained a BA in Modern Languages (German and Russian, plus Czech) at the University of Bristol and a Master’s in Slavonic Studies from Oriel College at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Brennan studied for a PhD at the London School of Economics on the subject of the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire and the degree of responsibility of its last monarch, Emperor Karl I. He taught undergraduates there for four years, with a one year hiatus in Paris lecturing American undergraduates on French history and on the history of Eastern European Communism. He has written on the memory of World War I and of the Habsburg Dynasty, on the Balkan Wars, on the author Joseph Roth, and on interwar Austria. He has authored chapters to several volumes on the collapse of Austria-Hungary and its aftermath, and is now working on a biography of Karl I. Returning to his first love (French History), he also plans to research Franco-Austrian relations before and after the Great War. He publishes in English, French and German.

Barbara Whitehead

Barbara J. Whitehead is the A. W. Crandall Professor of History at DePauw University and former Chair of the History Department. She earned her AB in History at Harvard University and her PhD in History from Bryn Mawr College. This educational background fostered a love of early modern Europe that has been the focus of her teaching and writing for over thirty years. At DePauw, Barbara has developed a broad spectrum of courses centered on European history ranging from the Viking Age and Crusades to the European witch hunts, the French Revolution, and the history of happiness. Her research in intellectual history has led to an edited volume on early modern women’s education and publications on forgotten figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In addition to leading over fifteen academic tours of Europe, Barbara has served as the on-site director of the American Colleges of the Midwest Central European Studies Program in the Czech Republic, where she taught European history. She also taught in the Danish International Studies Program in Copenhagen as a visiting professor. In addition to living in the Czech Republic and Denmark, Barbara has also lived in Rome and Paris.

Stéphanie Jeanjean

Stéphanie Jeanjean is an art historian, curator, and translator. She currently teaches Art History at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and in the Master's Program in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, in New York. She is also an educator working with The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA in New York.

Native to France, Stéphanie was born in Langres, a culturally rich historical small town in the Champagne-Ardennes region (in North-Eastern France), where she gained an early interest in the relationship between art, culture, and human activities throughout historical periods. She pursued Art History degrees, first at the Université de Bourgogne, in Dijon (Burgundy) and then by completing a Ph.D. in Art History at the CUNY (The City University of New York) Graduate Center.

Stéphanie presented her work at conferences worldwide, including Tate Britain, London (UK); KAIST University, Daejeon (South Korea), Brown and Cornell Universities, at MIT, and CAA annual conferences in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago (USA), and at Sorbonne Université (Paris 1), among others. Her work on French militant video has been published in Afterall Journal, and reprinted in Hilary Robinson’s anthology, Feminism Art Theory (Wiley & Blackwell Editions, Oxford, 2015). Her work on Sociological Art has been published in: François Bovier and Adeena Mey eds., Exhibited Cinema an Anthology, by ECAL and JRP Ringier Editions, (Lausanne and Zurich, 2016). Her recent publication, “Le multiple politique : Études sur le potentiel d’un médium, comme processus et mode d’action,” is available online, in French, on Plastik (Paris: La Sorbonne, No. 12, 2023). Last, Stéphanie major curated project is WE DISSENT: Design of the Women's Movement in New York (at 41 Cooper Gallery in New York), which presented the work by more than 130 women artists and women’s collectives active in New York. It was listed as "10 Under-the-Radar Art Show" in The New York Times (by Roberta Smith, Nov. 2018) and is accessible here: www.wedissent.space

Madeline Díaz

Madeline Díaz has expertise in art history and museum studies and more than 15 years of experience creating and leading programs for museums and cultural institutions. She has worked for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cloisters, the Frick Collection, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Smithsonian Latino Center for which she currently serves as consultant. She develops and leads education programs for several French cultural institutions, including the Grand Palais, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, and the Mona Bismarck American Center. She also teaches museum education and cultural mediation at the University of Versailles. Madeline has traveled extensively through Spain, Italy, and France and has a passion for art, photography, languages and flamenco. Madeline holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from Columbia University.