Dr.  Darius  A.  Spieth 

Professor

Bachelor's Degree(s): 1991-1993 University of Nebraska-Lincoln - B.A. in Art History and French (degree awarded with Highest Distinction) 1993-1994 Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne - Licence Program in Art History

Master's Degree: 1995-1996 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - M.A, in Art History; Thesis: "Modern Glass on Murano, 1920-1959" 1998-2000 International University of Japan - M.B.A. in International Finance; Thesis: "Japanese Corporate Investments in the International Art Market during the Bubble Period (c. 1985-1992)"

PhD: 1996-2001 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - Ph.D. in Art Histroy (18th- to 19th-Century European Art); Dissertation: "The Printed Work of Vivant Denon 1747-1825"

Phone: 225-578-4947

E-mail: dspieth@lsu.edu

Office: 219 Design Building

 

Area of Interest

Scholarship interests: The relationship between art, intellectual history, and economics

Research interests:  Art, Auctions, and Public Spectacles in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Awards & Honors

Louisiana State University

LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award (2010)

The Center for Freshmen Year Faculty Teaching Award, LSU University College (2010)

Summer Research Stipend, Council on Research, LSU (2009)

Service-Learning Scholars Faculty Grant, Center for Community Engagement, Learning, and Leadership (CCELL) (2009)

LSU Honors College Faculty Teaching Award (2009)

LSU "Rainmaker" (Top 100 faculty in research productivity) (2009)

Center for French and Francophone Studies Research Grant (2009)

LSU "Rainmaker" (Top 100 faculty in research productivity) (2008)

Phi Kappa Phi Non-tenured Faculty Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, LSU Chapter (2007)

Outstanding Teacher Award, College of Art and Design (2006)

Book Subvention Grant, Office of Research (2005)

Summer Research Stipend, Council on Research (2005)

External

Mellon Visiting Professorship. California Institute of Technology (2011)

NEH Summer Research Grant (2009)

Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. Lectureship Grant, Robert Lehman Foundation, New York (co-author with Prof. Mark Zucker) (2006)

Publication Grant, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago (book subvention) (2005)

Exhibition Grant, Merrill Lynch, Baton Rouge offices (corporate sponsors for student-curated exhibition Art & Money) (2005)

Stipend, Association of Internation Education Japan (1998-2000)

University Scholarship, University of Japan (1998-2000)

Regents' Scholarship, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (1992-1993)

Publications:

Books and Monographs (*peer-reviewed):

*Book manuscript Netherlandish Golden Age Art in Revolutionary Paris: A History of Old Masters, Finance, and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie currently under review, Los Angeles. (ca. 240,000 words, 300 illustrations.)

From L.A. to LA: Peter Shire at LSU, exh. cat., with Jo Lauria (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013).

Walter Bortolossi: All That Happened Had to Happen, exh. cat. (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2011).

Pierre-Antoine Labouchère: Un peintre protestant du XIXe siècle, with Françoise Boniol  (Carrière-sous-Poissy, France: La Cause, 2010).

* Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 216 pages, 66 illustrations.
 Reviewed in:
 Bibliotheca Orientalis 58, nos. 5-6 (2011);
 Eighteenth-Century Life 34, no. 3 (Fall 2010);
 Nineteenth-Century French Studies 37, nos. 1-2 (Fall/Winter 2008-09);
 French History 22, no. 4 (November 2008);
 Reference and Research Book News 23, no. 1 (February 2008);
 Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4, no. 2 (Winter 2009);
 The Best Five Books on Everything – French Egyptomania  
 (online: http://fivebooks.com/recommended/napoleon’s-sorcerers-by-darius-
spieth).

* Prints from the Serenissima: Connoisseurship and the Graphic Arts in Eighteenth-Century Venice, exh. cat. published in the Harvard University Art Museum Galleries Guide Series, No. 38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2002).
 Cited as essential reference work on Venice in:
 Venice: Webster’s Quotations, Facts, and Phrases, ed. Philip M. Parker,
 (San Diego: ICON Group International, 2008): 321.

Articles (*peer-reviewed):

*“Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun: Marchand d’art et promoteur du premier Louvre,” in La Grande Galerie: Le Journal du Louvre 33 (September/October/November 2015): 100-01.

*“The French Context of Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid: John Law, Rococo Culture, and the Riches of the New World,” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, eds. William N. Goetzmann, Catherine Labio, and Timothy G. Young (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 218-33.

*”Pierre-Antoine Labouchère’s French Martin Luther,” in SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art 30, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 32-46.

*”Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo: Peep Shows and the ‘Politics of Nostalgia,’” in The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (September 2010): 188-210.

“Walter Bortolossi: Lo spin-doctor della Storia / History’s Spin-Doctor: Walter Bortolossi,” in Perchè Dovunque: Walter Bortolossi, exh. cat. (Udine: Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Udine, 2010), n. p. (text in Italian and English).

“Description de l’Égypte,” in Treasures of LSU, Laura F. Lindsay, ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 140-41.

* “How Did Japanese Investments Influence International Art Prices?” together with Takato Hiraki, Akitoshi Ito, Naoya Takezawa, in Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 44, no. 6 (December 2009): 1489-1514. Revised and expanded version of the Yale International Center for Finance Working Paper, No. 03-09.

*“Terms of Engagement,” in Sandow Birk: The Depravities of War, exh. cat. (Makawao, Maui, and Santa Ana: Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center/Grand Central Press, 2007): 9-19.

* “Michel Rigo and Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801): Portraits of the Divan in Cairo,” in 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 13 (2006): 133-63.

* “The Corsets Assignat in David’s Death of Marat (1793),” in SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art 25, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 22-28.

*“The Prison in the Garden: Inside Sandow Birk’s Topography of Incarceration,” in Incarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century, exh. cat. (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, 2001): 7-15.

* “How Did Japanese Investments Influence Art Prices?,” together with Takato Hiraki, Akitoshi Ito, and Naoya Takezawa, Yale International Center for Finance Working Paper, No. 03-09. Published on-line under: http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=404800.

*Eight Entries in: The Ziff Collection of Old Master & Nineteenth-Century Drawings, exh. cat. (Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum, 1998): 32-5, 58-61, 96-7, 112-113, 120-121, 146-7.

Edited Volumes:

Guest editor for subject headings in Art Economics, Markets, and the Law, Grove Art Dictionary, Oxford University Press. Selected subjects and authors for 30 new entries, and oversaw revisions for another thirty existing entries. (In progress, 2014-2015.)

Alexander Rodchenko: Spatial Constructions/Raumkonstruktionen (New York and Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002). Edited together with Karin Osbahr. Bilingual English-German catalogue raisonné of Alexander Rodchenko’s constructivist sculptures.

Translations:

Blau, Eve, “Die polyzentrische Metropole: Otto Wagners Grossstadt Revisited [The polycentric Metropolis: Otto Wagner’s Grossstadt revisited],” trans. [into German] Darius A. Spieth, in Renate Banik-Schweitzer and Eve Blau, eds., Urban Form: Städtebau in der postfordistischen Gesellschaft [Urban Form: City Building in Postfordist Society] (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2003): 23-53.

Crawford, Margaret, “Die postfordistische urbane Transformation in der San Francisco Bay Region: Silicon Valley, Little Kabul und die Multi-Media Schlucht [The Postfordist Urban Transformation of the San Francisco Bay Region: Silicon Valley, Little Kabul, and the Multi-Media Gulch],” trans. [into German] Darius A. Spieth, in Renate Banik-Schweitzer and Eve Blau, eds., Urban Form: Städtebau in der postfordistischen Gesellschaft [Urban Form: City Building in Postfordist Society] (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2003): 73-100.

Blau, Eve, “Die Kodifizierung von Identität und Differenz: Otto Wagner’s Großstadt als Form und Idee [The Codification of Identity and Differenz: Otto Wagner’s Metropolis as Form and Idea],” trans. [into German] Darius A. Spieth, in Moritz Csáky and Peter Stachel, eds., Die Verortung von Gedächtnis [Assigning Place to Memory] (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2001): 209-243.

Interviews and Recordings:

Mizota, Sharon, “A New Image of the Koran [excerpts from an interview with Darius Spieth on Sandow Birk’s ‘American Qur’an’ project],” in Los Angeles Times (August 23, 2009): E6.

Commentary on murals by Xavier Gonzales (1898-1993) and Art Déco interior design at New Orleans’s Lakefront Airport for TV documentary “Sky Riders,” produced by Vincent Caire for WYES-TV Greater New Orleans Educational Television Foundation, New Orleans, Spring 2005.

Foreign Languages:

Fluent: English, French, German (native)
Intermediary: Italian.
Reading: Dutch.
Basic: Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, c. 200 Kanji).