Department of Art History welcomes new faculty

The Department of Art History welcomed two new faculty members for the 2024–25 academic year: Maggie Borowitz, assistant teaching professor of Latin American art history, and Oh Mee Lee, assistant teaching professor of East Asian art history.

Maggie Borowitz is an art historian whose research focuses on the relationship between art and politics in late-20^th-century Latin America with special emphasis on feminist practices in Mexico. She comes to Penn State from the University of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. in art history in 2022 and held a postdoctoral teaching fellowship from 2022–24. She is at work on a book manuscript titled “Magali Lara: Feminist Artistic Tactics and the Mexican 1980s,” which investigates the political potency of expressions of female subjectivity through a study of the art of Magali Lara.

Oh Mee Lee specializes in medieval Chinese painting, calligraphy, and texts. Focusing on specific qualities of ink and brush, her research examines the non-verbal and non-visual shifts from writing calligraphy to painting ever-variable ink washes, texture strokes, and outlined accents.

Lee’s teaching showcases materials and production, as well as individual objects, their use, and the layers of reflections upon them in introductory courses on Asian art and Buddhist art, as well as seminars on Japanese woodblock prints, premodern Chinese art, the literary arts of China, and Korean art. She particularly enjoys mentoring undergraduate student research and creative exploratory academic projects.