Ashley Elston, PhD

Associate Professor of Art History;
Director of Visual Arts

Contact Information

Rogers-Traylor Art Building, 402
CPO 2162
Email: elstona@berea.edu
Phone: 859-985-3544

Spring 2022

Office Hours

Mon/Wed: 2:30 – 4 p.m.
Thur: noon – 1 p.m.

Ashley Elston

Class Schedule

  • ARH 124  (Mon/Wed: 12:40 pm – 2:30 pm)
  • ARH 340  (Tue/Thur: 1:00 pm – 2:50 pm)
  • ARH 450  (Tue/Thur: 1:00 pm – 2:50 pm)

Courses Taught

  • ARH 121: Survey of Western Art I
  • ARH 124: Survey of Western Art II
  • ARH/AST 130: Studies in World Art: The Arts of East Asia
  • ARH/AST 227: The Arts of Buddhism
  • ARH 232: Classical Art and Archaeology
  • ARH/WGS 243: Women in Art
  • ARH 262: Italian Renaissance Art
  • ARH 265: Baroque Art
  • ARH 286: The Artist in Society
  • ARH/ART 286: Visualizing the Italian City (summer BIST abroad)
  • ARH 340: Seminar in Art History: Making and Buying Art in the Renaissance
  • ARH 450: Advanced Research in Art History (capstone course)
  • GSTR 310: Understandings of Christianity: The Image in Christianity

Publications

  •  Hybridity in Early Modern Art, co-editor with Madeline Rislow (Missouri Western State University), Visual Culture in Early Modernity series, Routledge Press, 2021.
  •  “Francesco di Valdambrino’s Wood Sculpture at the High Altar of Siena Cathedral” in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, eds. Amy Bloch and Daniel Zolli, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  •  “A Painted Saint and Passion Relics: Taddeo Gaddi’s Reliquary Cupboard for Santa Croce in Florence” in Mendicant Cultures in the Medieval and Early Modern World: Word, Deed, and Image, eds. Sally J. Cornelison, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Peter Howard, Brepols, 2016.
  • “Pain, Plague, and Power in Niccolò Semitecolo’s Reliquary Cupboard for Padua Cathedral” Gesta 51, no. 2, 2012, pp. 111-127.
  • Review: Paul Davies, Deborah Howard and Wendy Pullan, eds. Architecture and Pilgrimage, 1000-1500: Southern Europe and Beyond, in Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 4, no. 3, Spring 2014, pp. 95-105.

Degrees

  • Ph.D., in History of Art, University of Kansas, 2011
  • Masters degree in History of Art, University of Kansas, 2005
  • Bachelors Degree in History, St. Olaf College, 2002

Research Interests

Dr. Elston received her PhD from the University of Kansas in 2011 with a dissertation on the function and iconography of sacristy reliquary cupboards in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. She is interested in the visual culture of relics as well as the intersections of media in fifteenth-century Italy. Her current research project explores a 1917 exhibition of early Renaissance paintings in New York to raise money for the American war effort.