HNA is pleased to announce the slate of candidates for President and Vice-President, to serve four-year terms beginning at the next HNA Board meeting in March 2025. There are three candidates for President and two candidates for Vice-President. We are also voting on ratification of our new bylaws. You can find brief bios and statements from each of the candidates below. The proposed bylaws can be found here, together with an introductory note from Walter Melion, HNA President.
Cast your votes at this LINK.
Voting is open immediately for active members, and will close on Wednesday, February 5. Members who do not vote online will have an opportunity to cast votes “live” at the annual members’ meeting, to be held over Zoom on Friday, 7 February, at 12:00 pm (EST) (= 18.00 EU-time for our EU membership; = 9:00 am for our friends in LA and the West Coast; = 11:00 am Central). Casting a vote online in advance will serve as a proxy vote, taking the place of (and waiving one’s right to) a live vote at the annual meeting.
Current board and officers of HNA can be viewed here. Serving on the Nominating Committee were Paul Crenshaw, Past President, and board members Matt Kavaler, Isabella Lores-Chavez, and Cynthia Kok.
Only active HNA members are eligible to vote. To check the status of your membership, please login to your account. For any additional questions or concerns, please contact the HNA Administrator at administrator@hnanews.org.
Please vote!
HNA Election 2025 Ballot
Candidates for President (3 candidates, select one)
Elizabeth Honig
Elizabeth Honig is Professor of Northern European art at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of three books and many articles about Dutch and Flemish art, and is the editor of a group of websites on the Brueg(h)el family among other digital humanities ventures. She recently co-edited an issue of the NKJ and, long ago, the Antwerp Museum Jaarboek. She is currently writing a book about Nicholas Hilliard and small things in the Renaissance.
Having done a lot of work on scale, I see our field as a relatively small one that functions expansively. The recent HNA conference in Cambridge offered sessions on gender, climate change, the Dutch colonies and other global connections; on ‘Anglo-Dutchness’, migration, and cartography; on Vermeer, drawings, tapestries and pendants; on materiality and on digital/computational research. Historians of British art, as well as Netherlandish, participated. I was struck by the vigor of our scholars, the range of their research and by the collegiality which has always been a hallmark of this organization. We support students and emerging scholars, hold online fora, and keep members informed of exhibitions, events, and opportunities in the field. And of course there is the conference, scheduled to be held in Boston in 2027. I was on the committee for the 1993 Boston conference and would look forward to helping to organize this one. Our interface with HBA for the Cambridge conference worked out well, and the last time we were in Boston we worked with the American Association for Netherlandic Studies. I would imagine cooperating with other related organizations in future, for conferences and in other contexts. And I hope to work with the fundraising committee to continue and expand our impactful work for the field.
Marsely Kehoe
Marsely Kehoe is an independent scholar, author of Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture: Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), co-leader of The Dutch Textile Trade Project (dutchtextiletrade.org), and has published on city planning in Batavia/Jakarta, nautilus cups, the textile trade, and methods in digital art history. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Kress, Mellon, and Delmas Foundations and the Omohundro Institute, and works in university grants administration. Marsely has been on the HNA board since 2022, was the administrator of HNA from 2019 to 2021, and is a founding member of HNA’s Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) committee. She also serves on committees for the Renaissance Society of America and Textile Society of America.
In my nearly two decades as a member of HNA and six years of working closely with HNA’s leadership, I have seen changes in the field, both positive and negative: not only exciting new methodologies, discoveries, and fresh energy, but also shifts in the opportunities available to scholars of Netherlandish art. I have been working to expand HNA’s fellowship program, assisting in external grant applications, fundraising, co-hosting the HNA podcast, participating in our mentorship program, and updating HNA’s bylaws. HNA’s next president will oversee the documentation of committee processes and record-keeping (to fulfill the expectations of our revised bylaws), support our next conference in Boston, and establish new fundraising efforts, in order to expand the opportunities HNA can offer our members. I am thinking strategically about how we as an organization can best navigate the changing landscape, with the aim of sustaining the study of Netherlandish art and continuing to build an inclusive and supportive community for curators, scholars, collectors, and liefhebbers.
Lara Yeager-Crasselt
Dr. Lara Yeager-Crasselt is Curator and Department Head of European Painting and Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, as well as Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University. She is a scholar of the art of the early modern Low Countries with a particular focus on cross-cultural and artistic exchanges between the Netherlands and Italy. Lara’s curatorial and academic work have long been intertwined, and she is a strong believer in the importance of connecting these aspects of the field and the ways in which they mutually support and enrich one another. She is committed to strengthening HNA’s mission of collaboration, dialogue, and mentorship, and as President would continue to broaden and deepen our reach across established and new communities. This includes bolstering efforts to be inclusive, open, and curious in our research, outreach, and organization. It also includes furthering connections to other cultural and professional organizations, as well as relationships with our colleagues in the art market and collectors. Central to these efforts is bringing in new ideas for how we can raise funds to support the exciting and growing initiatives of HNA. Lara served on the board of HNA from 2020-2024 and chaired its Mentorship Program in the first years of its founding (of which she remains as an advisory member). She was also a member of the Fellowship Committee.
Lara’s publications and research largely focus on topics relating to artistic mobility and migration, collaboration, and identity in the early modern period. She is the author of Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and the Academy in Rome and Brussels (Pictura Nova, Brepols, 2016) and continues to publish and speak regularly on Netherlandish artists in Rome, the sculptor François Duquesnoy, and the impacts of social networks on artistic production. She is a regular participant in the HNA conference and has organized/co-organized scholarly convenings to support conversation in a public forum at the Clark Art Institute, the Morgan Library and Museum (with The Leiden Collection), and with Flanders House USA.
From 2017 to 2022, Lara was Curator of The Leiden Collection and previously served as Interim Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Clark Art Institute. She has curated or co-curated more than a dozen exhibitions at institutions including the Clark, the State Hermitage Museum, Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and the Timken Museum of Art. Her forthcoming exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Watershed: Transforming the Landscape in Early Modern Dutch Art opens in February 2025 and explores the role of water, landscape, and environmental change in shaping the early modern Dutch Republic.
Candidates for Vice-President (2 candidates, select one)
Art di Furia
Art DiFuria has been honored to serve as an HNA board member (2016–2019). At Savannah College of Art and Design, he is Associate Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Chair of Art History. There, he has received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence and University Presidential Travel and Research Grants. He has been a Kress Travel Fellow and the proud recipient of a Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowship. He edited Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives (Ashgate / Routledge, 2016). With Walter Melion, he co-edited Ekphrastic Image Making (2022) and with Ian Verstegen, he co-edited Space, Image, Reform: on the Work of Marcia Hall (de Gruyter, 2022). He is the author of Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Cult of Ruins (Brill, 2019). Art’s current book projects include an anthology on the Netherlandish interest in antiquity (under contract to Amsterdam U. Press), an anthology on the role of nature in early modern artistic formulations (under contract to Brill), a book on indie-Rock called Nobody’s Listening, and a book on early modern landscape, entitled The Abundant Landscape.
My experiences have sharpened my ability to collaborate and incorporate a range of opinions into new directions. I consider HNA my “home organization.” I have marveled at its evolution under its current leadership and see opportunities for growth based on their innovations. I am most heartened by HNA’s efforts at diversity (in membership and scholarly methods), the mentoring of early-career scholars, and the building of a vital, supportive community. If elected, I will expand on these initiatives. A desire to serve you as members should guide all future plans. That starts by hearing from you at regular intervals and is sustained by continued attempts to meet your needs. To best capture membership sentiment, I would promote robust participation in quarterly or bi-annually open online membership meetings (which would be recorded and available to members who could not attend) with accessible agendas and minutes. I would also organize and promote online and / or hybrid sessions at our triennial conference that on-ground attendees could witness communally, and on-ground sessions that remote attendees could access. More specific goals respond to the importance of the image in today’s digital world. Approximately 3.2 billion images are shared online every day. As Historians of Netherlandish Art, we are more important than ever, driven to the forefront of efforts to organize and interpret art history’s most diverse, sophisticated visual language and combinations of image, text, media, and global impetuses. We would thus be remiss if we did not help our younger members use the diverse skill set that Netherlandish art demands to pursue careers that are open to art history degree-holders, but extend beyond the traditional scholarly and curatorial tracks. I would strive to enrich our awareness of these related fields by bringing in guest speakers from outside of our traditional purview to speak at forums for our early-career members. It is my hope that these ideas will help bring our European and American memberships into closer contact in a global community of mutual support and inclusiveness.
Ashley West
I am an art historian of the early modern period, c. 1450-1700 at Temple University-The Tyler School of Art & Architecture, with a particular focus on the history, practice and theory of printmaking. I am interested in processes of cultural transmission and the dissemination of knowledge, as well as opportunities for artistic exchange across Northern Europe with the Ottoman Empire, the “New World,” Africa and the East Indies through travel and portable objects, pilgrimages, diplomacy, warfare, global trade and exploration, and early collecting practices. I have published on early etchings; history and the German sense of the past; Renaissance antiquarianism and early representations of peoples from the coast of Africa and India. Currently I am working on the visual culture and technologies of sixteenth-century Augsburg as a site for negotiating the global and the local in everyday experience.
I am running for reelection to serve as your Vice President of HNA. After working hard on some of the necessary but ‘less sexy’ committees to secure and modernize our organization’s footing with regard to our mission statement, bylaws, and finances, I am eager to build on that foundation to help tackle some of the practical challenges we face around developing professional pathways and funding our collective and individual work. I remain committed to supporting our student members and emerging scholars, especially in programming—such as in the new HNA Dissertation Forum—and in grant and mentorship opportunities. Above all, I want to find ways to keep us connected to one another and growing as a field, including across traditional boundaries of geography and disciplines.