Bret Rothstein | Faculty
Associate Professor, Department of History of Art
Director of Undergraduate Studies
E-mail: brothste@indiana.edu
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Education
- PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998
- MA, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1991
- BA, Reed College, 1989
Research Interests
- Northern European art of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries
- Early modern conceptions of interpretive skill
- Varieties and consequences of visual wit
Selected Publications
- “Beer and Loafing in Antwerp,” Art History 35:5 (2012), pp. 886-907
- “Making Trouble: Strange Wooden Objects and the Pursuit of Difficulty ca. 1596,” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13:1 (2013), pp. 96-129
- "Pieter Bruegel makes a mess of things," in: H. Luttikhuizen, ed. The Humor and Wit of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Grand Rapids: Calvin College, 2010, pp. 29-43
- “Looking the part: ruminative viewing and the imagination of community in the early modern Low Countries,” Art History 31:1 (2008), pp. 1-32
- “Gender and the configuration of early Netherlandish devotional skill,” in: A.G. Pearson, ed. The Face of Gender: Portraiture and Constructions of Female Identity in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2008), pp. 15-34
- Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Grants and Honors
- New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Grant, 2011-2012
- New Frontiers Exploration Travel Fellowship, Indiana University, 2010
- Summer Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University, 2008
- Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2006-2007
- Samuel H. Kress Foundation Travel Fellowship, 1996
- J. William Fulbright Fellowship, 1995-1996
Courses taught
- Seminar (A637 & A638); topics: So Much for Art. What of Thought?; Visual Wit in Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe; Difficulty and Interpretation in Early Netherlandish Visual Culture
- Critical Theory and Methods in Art History, ca. 1900 to the Present (A510)
- Art History Goes to the Movies (A490)
- Toys and the Visual Culture of Play (A483)
- Sixteenth-Century Visual Culture in Northern Europe (A482)
- A Cultural History of the Printed Image (A476)
- Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Visual Culture (A437)
- From Van Eyck to Vermeer (A333)
- Renaissance through Modern Art (A102)

