David Bjelajac
- Title:
- Professor of Art History and American Studies
- Office:
- Smith Hall of Art, Room 113
- Phone:
- 202-994-7093
- Email:
- [email protected]
David Bjelajac is the author of several books, including Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, D.C., 1988); Washington Allston, Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1997), and American Art: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2000; 2nd edition, 2005).
Professor Bjelajac's book chapter, "Freemasonry's 'Living Stones' and the Boston Portraiture of John Singleton Copley," appears in Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives, co-edited by Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019)
Professor Bjelajac’s most recent articles are: “Honey from the Louvre: Gleaning God’s Word from the Old Masters,” in Samuel F. B. Morse’s ‘Gallery of the Louvre’ and the Art of Invention, ed. Peter John Brownlee (Chicago and New Haven: Terra Foundation for American Art; distributed by Yale University Press, 2014); “Masonic Fraternalism and Muhammad Among the Lawgivers in Adolph Weinman’s Sculpture Frieze for the United States Supreme Court (1931-1935),” in The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology, eds. Christiane J. Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin: De Gruyter Publishing, 2014); and “Mercurial Pigments and the Alchemy of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” in Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, Vol. 9: Analyzing Art and Aesthetics, eds. Anne C. Goodyear and Margaret Weitekamp (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013). Professor Bjelajac’s current book project is “ John Singleton Copley’s Mercurial Shark and the American Revolution” devoted to the religious, political, cultural meanings of Copley’s most famous history painting, Watson and the Shark (1778).
