Art, Art History, and Film Faculty
Aurelia Campbell
Associate Professor, Art History & Director of Undergraduate Studies, Art History
Aurelia Campbell
Ph.D.
Contact
Devlin Hall 428
Telephone: 617-552-6476
Email: aurelia.campbell@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Pitzer College
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Courses
- Chinese Visual Culture
- Japanese Visual Culture
- East Asian Art and Architecture
- Buddhist Arts of Asia
- Modern and Contemporary Chinese Art
- Architecture in East Asia
- Forbidden City: Art and Architecture
- Gender and the Body in Chinese Art
Research Interests
- Chinese architecture
- Buddhist material culture
- Art of the imperial court
- Mortuary arts
- Materials and materiality
- Craft and technology
- Sino-Tibetan cultural exchange
Biography
Aurelia Campbell’s research centers on architecture and material culture from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties (1279-1911) in China. She is particularly interested in issues concerning materials and technologies, sacred objects and spaces, and the relationship between the imperial court and outlying regions.
Her first book, What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (University of Washington Press, 2020), examines the building projects of the famous Yongle emperor to consider how imperial ideology takes shape in built space. It was awarded the 2022 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award Honorable Mention from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her second book, in progress, moves away from the imperial, monumental, and expansive and towards sites of much more intimate scale: individual’s tombs. Focusing on the Ming dynasty, the book will consider burials from the perspectives of both architecture and material culture.
She has engaged in several projects that help to advance the field of Chinese architectural history. This includes compiling three annotated bibliographies for Oxford Bibliographies on the subjects of Palace Architecture in Premodern China, Buddhist Architecture in Imperial China, and Architecture of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Since 2017 she has also been involved in the compilation of an English dictionary of Chinese architectural history terms with scholars from China, Europe, and the United States.
Her research has been supported through grants and fellowships from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund, James Geiss Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Association for Asian Studies, and Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, among others. She has held visiting scholar positions at Peking University in Beijing and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She has served as the Visual Arts Editor for Religion and the Arts since 2022. She is a 2022-2023 SANnet Advocate.