The Graduate Theological Union is pleased to welcome Dr. Mia M. Mochizuki as assistant professor of art history and religion. She comes to the GTU from Columbia University, where she taught art history courses and worked on turning her dissertation into a book. She has also taught at the University of Chicago. “Now more than ever before we are being asked to think about religion, art and its societal implications,” she says. “I can’t think of a better place to explore such interdisciplinary challenges than at the GTU.”

Dr. Mochizuki received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University in 2001, where her study of the early Dutch Reformed Church after iconoclasm received the Theron Rockwell Field Prize for the best humanities dissertation in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Mochizuki has studied at Rijksuniversiteit Leiden in the Netherlands, and she holds a particular passion for the country’s seventeenth century period. At the time, the Netherlands was a place of freedom of religion and worship and almost a proto-democracy as the only country without a monarch.

At the GTU, her focus will be on western European art of the early modern period, the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation that gave us Rembrandt, Rubens, and Velázquez. In spring 2006, Dr. Mochizuki will offer two courses at the GTU: “Built of Living Stones” and “Iconoclasm and the Image.”

This joint appointment at JSTB and the GTU is supported by an endowment gift from Thomas E. Bertelsen Jr., M.A. ’93 and former chair of the GTU Board of Trustees.

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