Janet T. Marquardt is a distinguished professor emerita specializing in the historiography of medieval art and architecture, the lives of nineteenth-century American missionary women, and introductory art history survey courses. She is particularly interested in how memory, history, and cultural identity has been shaped by presentations and representations of visual imagery.
Having recently taught part-time for Boston College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Marquardt continues to research and write. She moved from Central Illinois to Western Massachusetts after retiring from 27 years at Eastern Illinois University (plus two as department chair at the University of South Florida, Tampa), where she founded the Center for the Humanities and the Art History study abroad program. Launching her fifth book in Amherst, offering early courses at the Bard microcollege in Holyoke, and forging a new field of study while at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley served to establish her in this new academic milieu.
Marquardt is now expanding her study of the Zodiaque books on Romanesque art, which she first treated in her monograph from 2015, looking at specific sites to consider how their popular photographs with the accompanying texts, maps, and plans, affected local appreciation for medieval monuments, determined conservation and restoration efforts, shaped tourism marketing, and contributed to the regional cultural identity. She is also considering an updated definition of the term “Romanesque” that comes directly from the breadth of the buildings and artworks that were documented in that series, all under the same stylistic term.
