Jean Givens

Jean A. Givens
Professor of Art History
PhD, University of California–Berkeley
jean.givens@uconn.edu

Jean Givens is Professor of Art History. Her research centers on medieval England andFrance, the history of history of visual and verbal literacy, and design initiatives in twentieth-century Denmark and Sweden. Her books include  Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge University Press, 2005)--awarded the Medieval Academy of America’s John Nicholas Brown Prize for 2009—and Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1220-1550 (Ashgate, 2006) co-edited with historians of science, Karen Reeds and Alain Touwaide. A new book on medieval and early modern scientific illustration, Reading Beyond the Text: Image, Word, and the Illustrated Tractatus de herbis, is nearing completion. She has received grants and fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and most recently, fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2004-05) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2006-07). Her current project, Marketing Modernism: Sweden, Denmark, and the Good Life, addresses a formative alliance between design theoreticians and Nordic policy makers between 1920 and 1960.

Professor Givens attended the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Lund, Sweden. Her degrees include a B.A. in Graphic Design as well as the Ph.D. in History of Art. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Fiji Islands for three years before joining the UCONN faculty in 1987. Honored with appointment as a University of Connecticut Teaching Fellow in 1997, she annually teaches an introductory survey of western art, upper-level courses on topics relevant to Classical and Medieval art, more specialized courses such as “The Early Illustrated Book,” and graduate seminars, most recently “Retail Madness: Shops, Shopping, and Urban Design.”

For an extract from Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art:
http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam051/2004043582.pdf

For a review of Visualizing Medieval Medicine:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2175065