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 a national culture after U.S. independence. She was recently invited to contribute an entry on Dunlap to the forthcoming Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (Continuum). Another recent project was curating Building a Modern Campus: Eliel and Eero Saarinen at Drake University for Drake’s Anderson Gallery and writing the catalogue essay.

The exhibition, running from November 7-December 19, 2008, analyzed the architectural and cultural legacy of the master plan, nine new buildings, and one addition that the internationally acclaimed architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen created for Drake University during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The exhibition and its programming received a major grant from Humanities Iowa, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lyons used this project as an opportunity to integrate her research and teaching by leading a curatorship seminar in which students worked on all aspects of the exhibition, from writing labels, to laying out and hanging the show, to providing public outreach. The project also involved the production assistance of a sculpture and graphic design class. In addition to the gallery display, students under her supervision created a website (www.buildingamoderncampus.com) that provides video tours of the Saarinen buildings at Drake. An ongoing project is researching the landscape paintings of Rockwell Kent in light of changing definitions of the American “homeland.”