WASHINGTON, DC.- The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2010–2011. They include Joseph J. Rishel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Carmen C. Bambach, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; and Victor I. Stoichita, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor for spring 2011. Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge has been named the 60th A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2011.

CASVA also announced the appointment of seven senior and four visiting senior fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, 18 predoctoral fellows, and three predoctoral fellowships for historians of American art to travel abroad.

CASVA was founded in 1979 to promote the study of the history, theory, and criticism of art, architecture, and urbanism through the formation of a community of scholars. A variety of private sources supports the program of fellowships, and the appointments are ratified by the Gallery's Board of Trustees.

The position of Samuel H. Kress Professor was created in 1965. It is reserved for a distinguished art historian who, as the senior member of CASVA, pursues scholarly work and counsels predoctoral fellows in residence.

Joseph J. Rishel, the Gisela and Dennis Alter Senior Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture and curator of the Rodin Museum, has been at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1972. He received a BA from Hobart College and earned his MA at the University of Chicago. He has served as the chairman of the Barnes Foundation College Assessment Advisory Committee and has been a member of the American Federation of Arts Exhibitions Committee since 2000. Rishel is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was made an officier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2002. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2010 and has been an editor, author, and contributor to many exhibition catalogues specializing in 18th- and 19th-century art.

The position of Andrew W. Mellon Professor was created in 1994 for distinguished academic and museum professionals. Mellon professors serve two consecutive years and pursue independent research at CASVA.

Carmen C. Bambach is curator of the department of drawings and prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received a PhD from Yale University, where she also earned her BA and MA degrees. Dr. Bambach was a John Simon Guggenheim fellow in 1996–1997 and the Craig Hugh Smyth Visiting Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in 2009. She is also the author of Una eredità difficile: I disegni ed i manoscritti di Leonardo tra mito e documento (1999) and Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (1999). Bambach's work has been published in The Burlington Magazine, Apollo, and an important series of exhibition catalogues on Italian Renaissance drawings.

The position of Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor was established in 2002 through a grant from the Edmond J. Safra Philanthropic Foundation. The Safra Professor serves for up to six months, forging connections between the research of the curatorial staff and that of visiting scholars at CASVA. At the same time, the Safra Professor advances his or her own research on subjects associated with the Gallery's permanent collection. The Safra Professor may also organize colloquia for predoctoral fellows and for emerging scholars and curators. The Safra Professor's area of expertise varies from year to year, spanning the Gallery's permanent collection—from sculpture, to painting, to works on paper of all periods.

Victor I. Stoichita is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at Université de Fribourg in Switzerland. He earned a Doctorat d'état from the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and his PhD from the University of Rome. He was the Rudolf Wittkower Visiting Professor at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut, in Rome in 2005 and received a fellowship from the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2002. Stoichita is the author of The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (2008), Goya: The Last Carnival (with Anna Maria Coderch, 1999), A Short History of the Shadow (1997), Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (1995), and L'instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l'aube des temps modernes (1993), all of which have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, among other languages.

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in 1949 "to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts." The program is named for Andrew W. Mellon, the founder of the National Gallery of Art, who gave the nation his art collection and funds to build the West Building, which opened to the public in 1941.

Mary Beard is a professor at the University of Cambridge, where she received her PhD in 1982 and where she served as the chair of the Faculty Board of Classics from 2005 to 2006. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Society of Antiquaries. Beard is the author of The Fires of Vesuvius (2008), The Roman Triumph (2007), The Colosseum (2004), and The Parthenon (2002); she is also the co-author of Classical Art: From Greece to Rome (2001), Religions of Rome I and II (1998), Classics: A Very Short Introduction (1995), and Rome in the Late Republic (1985).