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.