Autobiography of Dr. Donna M. Hunter
Dr. Donna Hunter received her BA in Art History from Vassar College in 1974 and
her Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University in 1988. Before beginning graduate
work, she was a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Germany at Ludwig-Maximiliens-Universität
in Munich. She has held paid internships at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C., the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the Newport Historical Society and the Newport
Art Association in Newport, Rhode Island, and Monumenta, a private corporation that
sponsors exhibitions of public art in New York and New England.
Dr. Hunter joined the faculty of the Department of Art History at the University
of California at Santa Cruz in 1985, first serving as a Lecturer before being appointed
to a tenure-track position. She received tenure in 1994. Her teaching responsibilities
include lecture and seminar courses in European and European-American art since 1600,
among them a large-enrollment class that introduces students to the study of art
and visual culture.
Her research has concentrated on the art and visual culture produced during the French
Revolution, with a special interest in portraiture and the democratization of many
aspects of elite culture (e.g., public schooling and the establishment of public
museums and libraries). She has published (or will soon see in print) articles and
chapters on the male martyrs of the French Revolution, the critical reputation of
Jacques-Louis David, depictions of market women (mara îchères),
C.L.R. James's use of the universal subject, and a portrait of the abbé
Sieyès. Her principal work-in-progress is a book-length manuscript on "swordplay,"
the verbal and visual representation of the Terror. Her research has been supported
by grants from AAUW, ACLS, a Getty-Ahmanson Fellowship at the Center for Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA and by participation in a NEH Summer Institute
for College and University Teachers at Stanford University on the invention of the
public sphere during the European Enlightenment.
Dr. Hunter has served as chair of her department and chair of a number of faculty
recruitments in her department. She has done considerable service at Santa Cruz,
in particular on the Committee on Educational Policy, its Subcommittee on the Reform
of General Education, the Porter College Executive Committee, the Digital Arts/New
Media Council, and the Sesnon Gallery Academic Advisory Group. She has been chair
of the Committee on Preparatory Education and the Chancellor's Advisory Committees
on the Status of Women and on Arts and Lectures. At the university she has also
been active in programs organized by Services for Transfer and Re-Entry Students,
Services to Students of Color, the Job Shadow Program run by the Monterey Bay Educational
Consortium, and the Speakers Bureau.
Dr. Hunter is a member of many professional associations in the United States and
France. Chief among them the College Art Association, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies, the Society for Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, the Group
for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the Société de l'histoire de l'art
française, and the Amis du Musée de la Révolution française
Dr. Hunter began work as full-time Associate Dean of Graduate Studies July 1, 2001.