PROFESSOR OF ART EMERITA

Kathleen Nolan shaped the art history program into a multi-faceted program and taught majors, minors, and nonmajors the skills to perceptively and thoughtfully interpret images from the past and present alike. She focused on medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art history during her 35-year career at Hollins, and her scholarly interests include the history of women in the Middle Ages and the works of art commissioned by women to tell their stories. She co-edited Arts of the Medieval Cathedrals: Studies on Architecture, Stained Glass and Sculpture in Honor of Anne Prache. Her book Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Identity of Queenship in Capetian France (Palgrave 2009) looks at queens’ personal seals and effigy tombs. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Art Bulletin, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Studies in Iconography, and Gesta.

Hands-on research was a hallmark of Nolan’s teaching. Thanks to a loan of decorative objects from the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia to Hollins’ Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Nolan’s 2017 Islamic Art class engaged with rare artifacts from the Near East, including rugs, pouring vessels, a traveling scribe set, a dish, a manuscript page firman, and bath sandals that date as far back as the 11th and 12th centuries and originated in Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

“The students and I were thrilled to have these,” Nolan said at the time. “There was great excitement in the vault of the Wilson Museum when we got to experience these objects firsthand.”

The following year, students in Nolan’s Gothic Art seminar conducted original research on a handmade French volume of prayer from the late 15th century called a book of hours that came to Hollins in the 1940s as part of an extensive collection of manuscripts donated by industrialist Samuel Herbert McVitty in memory of his wife Lucy Winton McVitty, who served as a member of the Hollins Board of Trustees. Produced throughout the medieval period, the books contained devotional text and also “some of the greatest paintings and drawings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance,” according to Wendy A. Stein of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nolan’s class centered on the book’s images, or “miniatures,” and created detailed catalogue entries for Wyndham Robertson Library’s Digital Exhibits website. “I wanted the students in this particular seminar to develop a visible record of their research and enhance the online presence of this gorgeous manuscript,” she explained.

For students in the Gothic Art seminar, examining the book of hours left an enduring impression. “I never thought I’d have the opportunity to come into such a close encounter with a manuscript like this that isn’t behind glass in a museum,” said art history major Clara Souvignier ’20. “It’s a prize that we have something this old and this worthwhile. The trust that Professor Nolan and the library placed in us means a lot.”

Another memorable experience for a number of students was Nolan’s January Short Term course, “Julie and Julia and Me: French Cooking and Food Culture for Everyone,” where they immersed themselves in books and videos about French culture and also got to gather at Nolan’s home to try their hand at preparing French cuisine.

“Years later, equations and theories may have no applications in daily life,” a Roanoke Times columnist wrote in a January 2012 article about the course. “But I’ll bet some of Kathleen Nolan’s students at Hollins University this term will never forget how to make French onion soup, flip an omelet, or truss a chicken.”

Among the honors Nolan received during her academic career at Hollins was the 2002 Herta Freitag Faculty Legacy Award, which recognizes a full-time teaching faculty member who has received external recognition of professional excellence in the form of publications and papers, exhibits and performances, prizes, and other related expressions of their work.

Nolan once called teaching at Hollins “one of the best jobs in America.” It’s easy to see why she found it so gratifying.