Born in England in 1931 of Irish immigrant parents and raised in Liverpool. He was educated at Oxford University, where he graduated in 1953 with First Class Honours in the Honours School of Modern History. Awarded a Goldsmiths' Company's Commonwealth Traveling Research Scholarship, he spent the next two years studying Latin Palaeography and the history of Medieval Philosophy at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto.[1]
Oakley's graduate studies were interrupted by the need to return to England to serve for two years (followed by reserve duty) in the British Army, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals and was attached to the Commonwealth Communications Army Network (COMCAN). Having decided to return to North America, he completed his Ph.D. in History at Yale University in 1959 and spent the next two years teaching in the Yale History Department before taking a position in the history department of Williams College. There, for forty years, he taught medieval and early-modern history, as well as courses in the Interdepartmental History of Ideas major (of which he was co-founder) and in the Environmental Studies Program until his retirement in 2002.
Oakley spent seventeen years of senior administrative service at Williams (1977–94), first as Dean of the Faculty, then as President of the College, and later, 2002–03, as President of the American Council of Learned Societies in New York City—an interim appointment.
He is married to the former Claire-Ann Lamenzo of Manchester, CT, a fiber artist and horsewoman. They have four children—Deirdre, Christopher, Timothy, and Brian—and seven grandchildren; William, Charlotte, Ryann, Erin, Kevin and Joslyn Oakley.[citation needed]
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other Founding Fathers of the United States. It is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
John La Farge was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, commonly referred to as the Clark, is an art museum and research institution located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. Its collection consists of European and American paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and decorative arts from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century. The Clark, along with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), forms a trio of art museums in the Berkshires. The institute also serves as a center for research and higher learning. It is home to various research and academic programs, which include the Fellowship Program and the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, as well as one of the most distinguished research libraries in the country, with more than 295,000 volumes in over 72 languages. The Clark is visited by 200,000 people a year, and offers many educational programs for visitors of all ages throughout the year.
Russell Sturgis was an American architect and art critic of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870.
Heiko Augustinus Oberman (1930–2001) was a Dutch historian and theologian who specialized in the study of the Reformation.
Stephen Carlton Clark was an American art collector, businessman, newspaper publisher and philanthropist. He founded the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Daniel Weiss is an American art historian who was the president and chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 2022, he announced his intention to step down from the role in June 2023 after an eight-year tenure.
David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator; recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world's leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park. The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, is named in his honor.
Yale Divinity School (YDS) is one of the twelve graduate and professional schools of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Robert Greenhalgh Albion was Harvard's first professor of Oceanic History and inspired two generations of maritime historians in the United States.
Peter Charles Schjeldahl was an American art critic, poet, and educator. He was noted for being the head art critic at The New Yorker, having earlier written for The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The New York Times.
Robert Sterling Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, was an American art collector, horse breeder, and philanthropist.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual culture theorist and professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is best known for his work developing the field of visual culture and for his many books and his widely used textbook on the subject. He was also Deputy Director of the International Association for Visual Culture from 2012-2016 and organized its first conference in 2012. Mirzoeff holds a BA degree from Oxford University and studied for his PhD at the University of Warwick.
Charles Howard McIlwain was an American historian and political scientist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1924. He was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University and taught at both institutions, as well as the University of Oxford, Miami University, and Bowdoin College. Though he trained as a lawyer, his career was mostly academic, devoted to constitutional history. He was a member of several learned societies and served as president of the American Historical Association in 1935–1936.
Brian Tierney was an English historian and medievalist. He was a member of the faculty of the Catholic University of America for eight years until becoming a professor of medieval history at Cornell University in 1959, where he was later appointed as the Goldwin Smith Professor of Medieval History in 1969 and the first Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies in 1977.
Michael Ann Holly is an American art historian who has worked on historiography and the theory of art history.
The Mary Ann Beinecke Decorative Art Collection is a research collection of more than 1200 volumes on textiles and decorative art subjects, which is held in the Library of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.
Olivier MeslayOAL is a Moroccan-born French art historian and curator. A scholar of British art, Meslay is the fifth director of the Clark Art Institute.
Whitney Chadwick is an American art historian and educator, who has published on contemporary art, modernism, Surrealism, and gender and sexuality. Her book Women, Art and Society was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1990 and revised in 1997; it is now in its fifth edition. Chadwick is Professor Emerita at San Francisco State University from the School of Art.
Wanda M. Corn is an American art and cultural historian.
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