Lisa Passaglia Bauman

Lisa Passaglia Bauman is an Associate Professor of Art History at George Mason University where she teaches courses on Italian Renaissance art and architecture, nineteenth-century European art, as well as introductory courses on the visual arts and architecture as part of the Mason Core curriculum. She recently developed a Study Abroad program for George Mason University in Florence, Italy, where she served as the Academic Director. She received her Ph.D. in Renaissance and Baroque art from Northwestern University. Her scholarly interests focus on cardinals as patrons in late fifteenth-century Rome and the elaborate rhetoric of patronage of the della Rovere family. Her publications include “Piety and Public Consumption: Domenico, Girolamo and Julius II della Rovere at Santa Maria del Popolo,” in Patronage and Dynasty. The Rise of the della Rovere in Renaissance Italy, and “The Rhetoric of Power: Della Rovere Palaces and Processional Routes in Late Fifteenth-Century Rome” in Patronage, Gender and the Arts in Early Modern Italy. Before coming to George Mason University, Dr. Passaglia Bauman was a lecturer in the Department of Museum Education at the Art Institute of Chicago where she developed and presented collection tours, thematic tours, and exhibition overviews in gallery walks and public lectures.  The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the largest and foremost collections of late-nineteenth-century French art in the world, material that is at the heart of the nineteenth-century European art course and Impressionism seminar she currently teaches.  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. 

Cassandra Potts Hannahs

Cassandra Potts Hannahs is a historian with special expertise in Celtic, Viking, and Anglo-Norman studies. She has enjoyed traveling with Smithsonian Journeys on more than 50 tours and cruises, sharing her passion and knowledge of Great Britain, France, and Ireland.

With a Ph.D. in medieval history, she was a tenured professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she taught courses on a wide range of subjects, from ancient history through the Reformation.  A Fulbright scholar and recipient of several grants, she has also spent considerable time living in France pursuing research.  Her publications include a book exploring the Viking settlement of Normandy in northern France during the 10th and 11th centuries, and the revival of monasticism that took place as the new rulers encouraged monks to return to the region after the Viking raids. 

In her research and lectures, Cassandra explores the cultural and political exchanges that have historically linked Britain, France, Ireland, and Scandinavia. She looks forward to sharing her love and knowledge of these lands, their history, music, and literature, with Smithsonian Journeys travelers.

Robert Dalessandro

Robert J. Dalessandro is an American historian and author who has written and presented extensively on the American Expeditionary Forces contributions to the First World War.

Dalessandro is a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army and the Deputy Secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission He is former Director of the United States Army Center of Military History at Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C. Dalessandro frequently leads battlefield tours to sites in the United States, France and Italy.

Dalessandro is widely published on the lifeways and material culture of the American Soldier in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. He is co-author of the Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Forces, 1917–1923, he serves as editor of the Army Officer’s Guide, co-author of Willing Patriots: Men of Color in the First World War, and Contributions of African American Soldiers and the American Lions: the 332nd Infantry Regiment in Italy in World War I.

His book, Organization and Insignia of the American Expeditionary Forces, 1917–1923 received the Army Historical Foundation award for excellence in writing.