Art, Art History, and Film Faculty

Aurelia Campbell is an art historian of China, with a particular focus on the Yuan (1279-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Her most recent research has centered on imperial architecture of the early Ming, when official buildings underwent a major structural shift. This is the subject of a number of her articles and book chapters, as well as her first book, What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (University of Washington Press, 2020). The book focuses on the far-flung construction projects of the famous Yongle emperor—including the Forbidden City in Beijing, a Daoist temple complex on Mount Wudang, and a Buddhist monastery at the Sino-Tibetan frontier—to consider how imperial ideology is given shape in built space. She is especially interested in the relationship between the imperial court and outlying regions and thus looks closely at the networks (craftsmen, materials, edicts, officials, precious objects, religious leaders) that connected them, ultimately arguing that architecture helped draw the emperor and his empire more closely together.

She is engaged in several ongoing research projects, including an examination of Tibetan Buddhist stupas and urban space in the capital city Dadu during the Mongol-ruled Yuan period; an art historical, environmental, and economic history of Dali marble from Yunnan province during the Ming and Qing dynasties; and a study of Ming dynasty tombs, about which we know very little in contrast to those of earlier periods.

Her research has been supported through grants and fellowships from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund, the James Geiss Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Asian Cultural Council, and the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, among others. She has spent over five years living in China (including in Beijing, Kunming, Ningbo, Shanghai, and Xining), and since 2018 she has been involved in the creation of an English dictionary of Chinese architectural history terms in collaboration with scholars from Vanderbilt University and Southeast University in Nanjing. During the 2016-2017 academic year she was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany.