Christina Smylitopoulos

Description

Dr. Christina Smylitopoulos (Associate Professor, School of Fine Art and Music) is an award-winning researcher and educator who specializes in the areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and visual culture and the pedagogical capacities of arts-based methodologies. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Centre for British Art and has been awarded grants and fellowships from, among others, SSHRC (IG; IDG; Connection); the Ontario Ministry of Science, Research, and Innovation; Lewis Walpole Library; Huntington Library; Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon (Library of Congress); and the Houghton Library (Harvard). Dr. Smylitopoulos was named Post-Secondary Art Educator of the Year (2023-24) by the Ontario Art Education Association and received the 2019 UGFA Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2014 College of Arts Teaching Excellence Award. Her general teaching interests fall within the latter half of the early modern period, from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the 1830s. This period spans the European Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, as well as the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars. In her lecture courses, students will explore the High Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism along with approaches to artistic production that may complicate or defy stylistic categorizations. Her experiential learning courses combine ethical curatorial practice with hands-on training in the SOFAM Print Study Collection, a valuable resource containing 2,200 works of art spanning the technological and aesthetic developments of fine art printmaking from the 16th century to today. Students gain experience in collections management, exhibition practice, museum education, and learn marketable skills (including fundraising, project management, event planning, and community outreach) that apply to a range of professions.