Dr. James van Dyke is a current Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919-1945, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany (2010), and is currently working on his second book on Otto Dix, from which his lecture derives. 

The AGAS lecture is sponsored by the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, and the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Lecturer Bio

James A. van Dyke is an Associate Professor of Modern European Art History in the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri, is President of the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture, and serves on the DAAD’s national pre-doctoral fellowship selection committee in the United States. During the past three decades, he has published extensively on twentieth-century German art, artistic debates, and artists, including Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, E.L. Kirchner, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Werner Peiner, and Franz Radziwill. A particular focus of his work has been the effects of social, economic, and political crisis on the field of artistic production in Germany, and in particular on the relationships between modernism and anti-democratic, nationalist ideology and politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the journals in which his work has appeared are Art History, the Oxford Art Journal, Kunst und Politik, the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, New German Critique, Oxford German Studies, and German Studies Review. His first book, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919-1945, was published by in University of Michigan Press’s series “Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany” in 2010. He is currently completing his second, entitled The Social Production of Otto Dixin Critical Detail.