Juliet Koss, professor of art history, has been appointed to the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Chair in the History of Architecture and Art, effective October 15, 2018.
Professor Koss joined the College in 2000, when she received her PhD in the History and Theory of Art and Architecture from the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, having earned a BA in Art History from Columbia College in New York. She has been a valuable member of the Scripps faculty as well as a significant contributor to the Program in Art History at The Claremont Colleges, teaching such courses as European Modernism, the Bauhaus, the Russian and Soviet Avant-Gardes, Old New Media, and Representing the Metropolis. In 2005 she founded the Department of Art History at Scripps; she also regularly teaches in the Core program, both in Core I and, more recently, with Core II and Core III classes. Promoted to full professor in 2018, Professor Koss has been elected multiple times by her colleagues to the Faculty Executive Committee and has chaired the Committee on Academic Review and the Academic Policy Subcommittee, twice each. She has been awarded the Mary W. Johnson Faculty Achievement Award three times, once for teaching and twice for research, and served as Director of the Humanities Institute in fall 2014 with a semester’s offerings on the theme of “silence.”
Professor Koss has published extensively on modern European architecture and art, with an emphasis on German and Soviet modernism, and she lectures regularly both nationally and internationally. Her scholarship has been supported by, among others, the Getty Research Institute; the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal; the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts; and, for two and a half years, the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. A Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin in 2009 and a Visiting Scholar at the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Columbia University in 2015 and 2016, she also served in 2011 as the Rudolf Arnheim Visiting Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her book Modernism after Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) was shortlisted for the prestigious Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association; her current book project, Model Soviets, explores the status and function of models—architectural designs, art objects, and more abstract visions of future possibilities—in the first two Soviet decades.
Scripps College recognizes Professor Koss’ contributions to the Scripps community and her scholarly standing by her appointment to the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Chair in the History of Architecture and Art.