Margueritte Mayhall, Ph.D.
Areas of Expertise
Marguerite Mayhall is an Assistant Professor (with tenure) at Kean. She serves as Art History Program Coordinator and is the BFA Studio Arts Photography Option adviser, and has served as Fine Arts Department (now denoted as a program) chair and assistant chair, in addition to several university committees.
Mayhall began her academic life as a scientist, concentrating in molecular biology as an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in north Texas, and then doing graduate work and laboratory research on bacteriophage T7 at The University of Texas at Austin. After leaving the biology program, she worked as an unpaid intern in photographic and manuscript conservation at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center while supporting herself working in just about every public and university library in Austin, earned the equivalent of a second bachelor’s in studio art and art history with the goal of becoming an art conservator, and finally settled in the graduate program in art history at Texas.
Her past research has focused on the arts in Venezuela in the 20th century, with publications in encyclopedias of Latin American art and architecture and journals on Latin American issues. Since the failure of democracy in Venezuela, her research has focused on sacred space and sacred landscape, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and, most recently, material culture and class in the United States in the 19th century.
She was inducted into the Kean chapter of Phi Kappa Phi in 2009 and received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. In 2007 she was awarded an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) summer stipend for a book project titled Venezuelan Art and National Identity, 1930-1960.
Mayhall’s current research projects include a university-funded grant project at Liberty Hall Museum working with students on material culture and class and a book on sacred space and sacred landscape.