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Charles Burroughs, the interim Chair of Classics and Elsie B. Smith Professor of Liberal Arts, is a cultural
historian with a primary interest in the art and architecture of late- and
post-medieval Europe, especially Italy. His academic training was first in
Classics: he has a BA in Literae Humaniores (i.e., ancient philology,
literature, and history and ancient and modern philosophy) from Balliol
College of Oxford University, and the M.Phil and Ph.D from the Warburg
Institute of London University, a renowned interdisciplinary research center
officially dedicated to the study of the History of Science and of the
Classical Tradition. He came to CWRU in 2005 as Chair of the Department of
Art and Art History, and was in 2006 acting Chair of Classics for one
semester. In his teaching he focuses on various aspects of the classical
tradition, and responses to it or reactions against it, in the visual arts
and in architecture. He is currently teaching courses on Gothic Europe and
on the use and symbolism of domes in architecture, both in and beyond the
Euro-American tradition.
In his research and publications Charles Burroughs has focused especially on
late medieval and early modern Italian architecture, visual culture, and
urban and landscape design, i.e., at a time of especially intense engagement
with the legacy of antiquity in terms of artistic innovation as well as
antiquarian research. He has published on the development of Rome and its
region in the early Renaissance, the evolution of the façade as a key factor
both in architectural and cultural history, and the relationship between
social space, virtual space (i.e., as represented or evoked in important
pictorial works), and the space of more or less ritualized performance
(e.g., the Roman carnival). He has written extensively such key figures on
Michelangelo, Leon Battista Alberti, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, and Palladio,
and the patronage of, among others, Popes Nicholas V, Paul III, and Sixtus
V, as well as Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
Currently Charles Burroughs has two major scholarly projects. One involves a
monograph on Botticelli's Primavera as a political painting; he connects the
painting itself and related cultural phenomena (not least architecture) to
the reception of Aristotelian ethical and political theory in
fifteenth-century Florence, especially concerning the foundation, character
and legitimacy of various forms of civil society. The other main research
project, which received recognition in the form of a Getty Foundation
collaborative grant, deals with plantation landscapes and architecture, as
both vehicles and objects of representation, in the Americas in the early
19th century. With a highly international and interdisciplinary group of
colleagues, then, Charles Burroughs is studying what was arguably the final
stage of a form of social and spatial organization, dependent on unfree
labor, which was established in antiquity and provided with influential
justifications in ancient texts.
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