Barbara Maria Stafford

William B. Ogden distinguished service professor emeritus in the department of art history at the University of Chicago. From 2010-2012, she served as distinguished university visiting professor as well as distinguished critic in the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Stafford now serves as an independent researcher, writer, exhibition curator and speaker. In 2001 and 2002 she co-curated the exhibition “Devices of Wonder” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and edited the exhibition catalogue. Her books, in various ways, reveal the connections between the arts, sciences, and optical technologies: geography, geology, and mineralogy in Voyage into Substance (1984); anatomy and the life sciences in Body Criticism (1991); and neuroscience and cognitive science in Echo Objects (2007). She also writes historically grounded manifestos on the vital significance of the visual and sensory arts to general education as well as to society at large (Artful Science [1994] and Good Looking [1996]).