Lisa Florman, professor and chair of the Department of History of Art, has been re-appointed as chair of the department, effective through Aug. 31, 2022. 

Florman received her BA from the University of Virginia and her MA, M. Phil. and PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. She joined the Ohio State faculty in 1994, rising to the rank of associate chair of the Department of History of Art in 2005; acting chair in 2008; and department chair in 2014.

Her primary interests are in modernism; the history of art history; and the intersection of the two in the early 20th century. Florman’s first book, Myth and Metamorphosis (MIT Press, 2000), examined Picasso’s classicizing prints of the 1930s in the context of both surrealism and contemporaneous understandings of classical antiquity. Her second book, Concerning the spiritual — and the Concrete — in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford University Press, 2014),  draws upon written texts as well as careful analyses of the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky to provide a rigorously philosophical account of why painting turned toward abstraction in the early 20th century.