Members' Crash Course in Buddhist Art with Assoc. Prof. Aurelia Campbell (Oct. 18, 2023)

To provide a wider context for the Buddhist objects currently on display in the McMullen Museum’s exhibition, Gateway to Himalayan Art, Associate Professor of Asian Art History at Boston College Aurelia Campbell will present an hour-long crash course on the history of Buddhist art for Museum Members. (FYI: Boston College faculty, staff, and students are all Museum Members!) Aurelia Campbell is Associate Professor of Asian Art History at Boston College. Her first book, What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming, examines the building projects of the famous Yongle emperor to consider how imperial ideology takes shape in built space. It was awarded the Bei Shan Tang Monograph Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2023 and the honorable mention for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians in 2022. Her second book, In Death as in Life: A Material History of Ming Dynasty Tombs (in progress), investigates the tombs of the Ming dynasty elite from the perspectives of both architecture and material culture. She has also engaged in several projects that help to advance the field of Chinese architectural history. This includes the compilation of three annotated “state of the field” bibliographies for Oxford Bibliographies and involvement in a longstanding international collaboration to create an English dictionary of traditional Chinese architectural terminology.