The Penn Alumni Faculty Award of Merit recognizes a faculty member who has made outstanding contributions to alumni lifelong learning and engagement at Penn by sharing his/her/their unique scholarship work with the alumni community. Special emphasis is placed on a faculty member who goes above and beyond the call of duty by engaging alumni with the University as their intellectual home and educating the faculty community about available alumni engagement opportunities and benefits of their participating.
Congratulations to the 2024 Faculty Award of Merit Recipient!
André Dombrowski, Ph.D.
Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th Century European Art in the Department of the History of Art
André Dombrowski is the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th Century European Art in the Department of the History of Art. Appointed at Penn in 2008, he is an esteemed scholar of the arts and material cultures in 19th-century France and Germany. He is the author of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (University of California Press, 2013), winner of the Phillips Book Prize--a book about the artist’s strange early work, marked by themes of violence and fraught domesticity. His second monograph, Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time, appeared with Yale University Press in November 2023. The book locates the rise of the Impressionist instant—and nineteenth-century painting’s presumed new “quickness” and hectic appearance more broadly—in the period’s innovative time-technologies and forms of time-management. Dombrowski has also written many essays, including on such influential artists as Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Caillebotte, and Menzel, among others. With Professor Hollis Clayson, he has co-edited Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Routledge, 2016), has served as one of the editors of the large-scale 2021 volume Cézanne in the Barnes Foundation, and he is also the editor of the Companion to Impressionism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021). With his students, he has organized exhibitions on campus, and edited accompanying catalogs, covering topics from the visual culture of the Dreyfus Affair to the 19th-century world's fairs. He was centrally involved in the rediscovery of a long-lost Courbet landscape at Penn that was revealed to the public at the Arthur Ross Gallery in 2023. At Penn, he has served as undergraduate chair of his department, chair of the Arthur Ross Gallery's advisory board, member of the School of Arts and Sciences’ Diversity Council and the University’s Graduate Council of the Faculties, convener of the LGBTQ+ faculty diversity working group, and as a 2018-2020 Penn Fellow. For Penn Alumni Travel, he has led trips to Alsace, Brittany, Normandy, and Provence, to Holland and Switzerland, as well as to Tahiti, and has accompanied cruise tours up and down the Rhein and Danube rivers; he has also lectured widely for Penn's alumni over the years, including a recent online seminar about his new scholarship on Impressionism.
The award will be presented at the Alumni Award of Merit Gala, Friday, November 15, 2024.