B.A., Scripps College, 2006; M.A., NYU 2009; Ph.D., State University of New York, Buffalo, 2019

Anne Marie Butler (she/her) specializes in contemporary Tunisian art within contexts of global contemporary art, contemporary global surrealism studies, Southwest Asia North Africa studies, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory. Within these areas, she considers how issues of gender, sexuality, and queerness coincide with parameters of the nation-state, and the imbrication of state authority within social constructs.

At K, she teaches at the intersection of visual culture and gender studies, instructing courses such as Art, Power, and Society, Queer Aesthetics, Performance art and core WGS classes. 

She is open to serving as an external committee member for PhD dissertations relevant to her fields of study.

Recent publications:

Butler, Anne Marie E. “Surrealism and Power in Contemporary Tunisian Art: Sculpture by Aïcha Filali and Houda Ghorbel,” ASAP/Journal 7 no. 3 (2022): 499-521. 

Butler, Anne Marie E. and Christine Hahn, “Decolonize this Art History: Imagining a Decolonial Art History Program at Kalamazoo College, London Review of Education 19 no. 1 (2021): 1-15. 

Butler, Anne Marie E. “‘Art is Intrinsically Revolutionary:’ Post-Revolution Performance Art in Tunisia,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 16 no. 3 (2020): 1-20.

A native of the Washington, DC area and a graduate of Bowdoin College, James Denison recently completed his PhD. in art history at the University of Michigan. His overarching professional goal is to research, think, write, teach about and publicize new understandings of the relationships between art/visual culture, artists, and the art world and systems of identity and power formation in U.S. society. He is working towards this goal in part through a book project born of his dissertation research, which offers a new interpretation of the second Stieglitz Circle (the loose group whose key members – Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keeffe – assembled around the Manhattan photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz beginning in the late 1910s) by connecting its members’ work to the fraught racial environment of the interwar period. By considering how these artists’ works have contributed to the construction of racial categories over the last century, it proposes a new interpretation of the role of modernist primitivism in U.S. racial formation.

He has previously been awarded fellowships from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rackham Graduate School, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, and the University of Michigan History of Art Department. In his free time he enjoys playing basketball, water polo, and disc golf, watching movies, and following a variety of ill-fated sports teams. As a postdoctoral fellow, his duties combine teaching at the College with contributing to curatorial projects at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Christine Hahn specializes in 20th century art, examining how the circulation of art via expatriate artists; traveling exhibitions; and the museum space creates multilayered meanings for global audiences. She is currently at work on a book project that examines the history of 20th century Korean painting and its relationship to Western modernism, Japanese colonialism, and the aftermath of the Korean War.

Dr. Hahn received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has had the opportunity to share her work with local, national, and international audiences. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 2002, spending the year in Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Hahn has developed several new courses for the Art History curriculum at K, including Art and Gender, a course on the history of the modern art museum, and a methodological course on important theoretical texts in 20th century art.

Danny Kim has worked in video production for over 30 years: writing, filming and editing in many different formats, including documentary-style, electronic-news gathering (ENG), single-camera narrative, multi-camera productions and live events. He has traveled to over 50 countries, showcasing the work of NGOs and other organizations on topics such as Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, women’s literacy in India and El Salvador, water well-building in Thailand and Guatemala, mother/child health in South Africa, and more. He received a Gold Camera Award for Editing at the U.S. Industrial Film & Video Festival (1992) for “Clean Water: Cambodia”.

Danny’s films have screened at many festivals, including Reading FilmFEST, East Lansing Film Festival, and Made-in-Michigan Film Festival.  His feature-length documentary “The Stories They Tell” was awarded Best Local Film at the North by Midwest Film Festival in 2016 and Best Documentary at the Soo Film Festival in 2021.  For fun, Danny and his colleagues enjoy taking part in local 48-hour film competitions. 

Born in 1960, Richard Koenig received his BFA from Pratt Institute. In 1998 he received his MFA from Indiana University and began teaching art and photography courses at Kalamazoo College, Michigan.

His fine art work, Photographic Prevarications, was shown in six one-person exhibits in as many years (from 2007 to 2012). Koenig’s long-term documentary project, Contemporary Views Along the First Transcontinental Railroad, spawned four articles (between 2014 and 2019). In addition, he has published articles in Railroad Heritage (2017), Railroad History (2019), the Double A (2021), and most recently in the Quarterly Newsletter of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society (2022). Along the way he contributed to an exhibit, Hoosier Lifelines, on the history of the Monon Railroad (2021).

Two pieces appeared digitally in July of 2022: City as Metaphor, a re-photography project on Brooklyn, was showcased on Pictorial List, an on-line photography magazine; he also published, See Change: A Memoir, on Lenscratch, a fine art photography daily.

Sarah Lindley’s studio practice spans multiple disciplines, including sculpture, installations, and ceramics. Her creative work has transitioned from objects that frame vacant interior spaces (reflections on public and private space) to renditions of Dutch Cabinet Houses (museums of domestic space, housed within the space itself). Most recently, Sarah’s work has moved beyond the walls of the interior to the domestic landscape (industry, small communities, and environmental trauma).

Lindley’s creative work has been recognized by numerous grants and exhibitions, including biennales in France, Korea, and Taiwan. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. Sarah was a resident artist at the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands and has thrice been an Arts-Industry Resident in Kohler, Wisconsin. She was one of two inaugural Faculty Fellows in the Arcus Center of for Social Justice Leadership.

Firth MacMillan is a visual artist based in Nova Scotia and Toronto. In her work she materializes experiences of pointed yet everyday moments from her life. Through her sculptural and photographic practices, she investigates whether the depth of these ordinary moments as she initially experiences them can translate into her artwork. Firth is currently working on a book of photographs, one from each day of the year, taken over the last 13 years. Each photo is paired with excerpts from her daily writing practice over the same period.

The recipient of numerous awards including Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, MacMillan most recently exhibited at The Argyle in Toronto, Nordic House in Reykjavic, the College of Creative Studies in Detroit and the Bobbit Visual Arts Center at Albion College in Michigan.

Firth MacMillan received her MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and holds BFA degrees in ceramics from The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and photography from the University of Michigan.

Tom received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and a MFA from the University of Georgia. Mr. Rice has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation. His honors include the Lucasse Fellowship for Excellence in Creative Work awarded by Kalamazoo College.

Among his commissioned works are pieces for the Xerox Corporation and the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial. His work has been exhibited at the South Bend Regional Museum of Art, the Evansville Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, the Lansing Art Gallery, the Arkansas Arts Center, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, the Urban Institute of Art and the Kresge Art Museum.

Jacob Converse received a BFA with emphasis in Printmedia from the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. He received the Presidential Scholar award in 2022 in recognition of his work at WMU. Since graduation, Converse has held multiple positions for the Frostic School of Art as a Recruiting Manager and Lead Preparator at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts.

Converse is also an active artist, fusing digital and traditional techniques. He found passion for printmaking as a hybrid practice that facilitates an inclusive exploration of various media that is considerate of language and tradition. Often focusing on the dichotomy of life and death, his work takes on elements of preservation that communicate a perception of the surrounding world. As an artist, his attempt to find meaning in life is often futile, however, he finds it interesting how we ultimately express our humanity by doing so.