Mansfield, Youmans named distinguished professor

Elizabeth “Cassie” Mansfield, professor of art history, and Charles Youmans, professor of musicology, have been named Penn State distinguished professors in recognition of outstanding academic contribution to the University. Bestowed on a limited number of professors by the Office of Faculty Affairs, the distinguished professor title recognizes faculty who are leaders in their fields of research or creative activity and who have demonstrated significant leadership with respect to teaching, research or creative activity, and service. 

“Professors Mansfield and Youmans exemplify excellence in teaching, research, creative scholarship, and service at Penn State,” said B. Stephen Carpenter II, Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Dean in the College of Arts and Architecture. “As internationally renowned scholars in their respective fields, they have established themselves as exceptional educators and influential mentors. Their ongoing contributions to the College of Arts and Architecture have been invaluable. The title of 'Distinguished Professor' is a fitting recognition of their outstanding achievements.”

Mansfield came to Penn State in 2018 to serve as head of the Department of Art History, a position she held until 2023. Her research combines technology and art, extending beyond the field of art history to impact the fields of literature, history and information technology. She is currently collaborating with colleagues in computer science, meteorology and statistics as co-principal investigator for the Constable’s Clouds project, which received two National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Enhancement grants. The project explores the application of computer vision to the study of paintings by John Constable, a 19th-century European artist noted for the striking naturalism of his landscapes.

Prior to coming to Penn State, Mansfield was senior program officer at the Getty Foundation. She previously served as associate professor in the Department of Art History at New York University, during which time she held the National Humanities Center Fellowship. She began her academic career as an assistant professor at Sewanee: The University of the South. While there, she was named Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE)/Carnegie Professor of the Year for Tennessee. She served as Sewanee’s art history department chair from 2002 until 2007. Mansfield received the Charles Rufus Morey Book Prize in 2008 for her book, “Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth and Mimesis in Western Art.”

Mansfield holds bachelor of arts degrees in linguistics and art history from the University of California at Irvine and a doctoral degree in fine arts from Harvard University.

Youmans, who joined the School of Music faculty in 1999, is internationally recognized as a leading scholar of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, the foremost orchestral composers of the European fin-de-siècle. His seminal work, “Mahler and Strauss: In Dialogue” (Indiana, 2016), the first monograph on the musicians' 24-year friendship, brought an end to a century of partisan scholarly infighting. An earlier monograph, “Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition” (Indiana, 2005), revealed the private literary and philosophical context of Strauss's nine tone poems, mainstays of the orchestral repertoire. This work elicited an invitation to contribute all nine chapters on Strauss's tone poems to the “Richard Strauss-Handbuch” (Bärenreiter, 2014).

Author of more than two dozen scholarly articles and essays, Youmans has edited “Mahler in Context” (Cambridge, 2020) and "The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss" (2010), collections bringing together the world's leading scholars of these composers. His current book project, also for Cambridge, is titled "Mahler at the Met: Two Astonishing Years at the World's Greatest Opera House" (forthcoming, 2026).

Before joining the School of Music faculty, Youmans taught at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He holds bachelor of music and master of music degrees in guitar performance from the University of Georgia, and master of arts and doctoral degrees in musicology from Duke University.