NEH Chairman To Deliver Public Leadership Series Lecture

by Lori Scott Fogleman

Dr. Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be the featured speaker for Baylor University's Public Leadership Series at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 14, in the Jim Kronzer Appellate Advocacy Classroom and Courtroom (room 127) at the Sheila and Walter Umphrey Law Center. The lecture is free and open to the public.
"As chairman of the NEH, Dr. Cole oversees the largest funding agency of the humanities in the United States, and his visit to Baylor marks an important step in the university's efforts to become a top-tier research institution," said James Odom, director of the office of public affairs at Baylor.
The Public Leadership Series is an initiative at Baylor designed to increase understanding of government and the ideal of public service in society. Asa Hutchinson, director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at the time, delivered the inaugural lecture in September 2002. Hutchinson now serves as Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security. Baylor graduate and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards was the second speaker in the Public Leadership Series in April 2003.
A scholar of Renaissance art, Cole is the eighth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He came to the Endowment in December 2001 from Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was Distinguished Professor of Art History, professor of comparative literature and chair of the department of the history of art at the Hope School of Fine Arts.
Cole is the author of 14 books, including The Renaissance Artist at Work; Sienese Painting in the Age of the Renaissance; Italian Art, 1250-1550: The Relation of Art to Life and Society; Titian and Venetian Art, 1450-1590; and Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-Modernism. His most recent book is The Informed Eye: Understanding Masterpieces of Western Art.
Cole attended Case Western Reserve University and earned his master's degree from Oberlin College and his doctorate from Bryn Mawr College. He has served as the William E. Suida Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and has held fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Kress Foundation, American Philosophical Society, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the UCLA, and National Endowment for the Humanities.
His relationship with NEH dates from 1971 when he was awarded a fellowship to conduct research on "The Origins and Development of Early Florentine Painting." He has served as a panelist in NEH's peer review system, and in 1992 was named by President George H.W. Bush to the National Council on the Humanities, the Endowment's 26-member advisory board, where he served for seven years.
Cole is a corresponding member of the Accademia Senese degli Intronati, the oldest learned society in Europe, and a founder and former co-president of the Association for Art History.
For more information, contact the office of public affairs at 710-1421.