Biographical Information::
Ph.D. in Art History, Boston University (1999)
M.A. in Art History, Boston University (1992)
B.A., Georgetown University (1990)

Statement
In my teaching and research I approach the visual arts and the narratives created to account for them as dynamic means of shaping the world through representation. I encourage the careful examination of images, objects, and buildings as discrete designs that contribute to ongoing formal and conceptual dialogues. In order to understand these dialogues, I find it necessary to undertake detailed historical research that examines the resonance of imagery in particular times and places. As an art historian I believe that studying the visual culture of the past, whether distant or recent, helps us to understand our present by revealing the continuities and discontinuities between the here and now and the there and then. I am particularly interested in the structures of thought – cultural, political, critical – that have organized European and U.S. perceptions of visual art since 1800.

Scholarship::
In 2005 Lyons published her first book: William Dunlap and the Construction of an American Art History (University of Massachusetts Press). This study examines the first history of American art, published in 1834, as one means of creating an independent national culture after U.S. independence. Her more recent scholarship addresses twentieth-century U.S. art, including an analysis of the relationship between the landscapes of the painter Rockwell Kent and changing definitions of the American “homeland.” She is currently organizing an exhibition for Drake’s Anderson Gallery about the extensive contributions of the architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen to the university’s campus after World War II.

Other recent projects include writing a book review essay that appeared in the march 2005 issue of the journal "Reviews in American History", and working on an article that analyzes the landscape paintings of Rockwell Kent.