Daniel González, research professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Director of the diploma in Art History at the same university, is spending January and February as Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. This is his second time as Visiting Scholar at Columbia: The first time was in October -November 2017, under the academic sponsorship of Avinoam Shalem, Riggio Professor of the History of the Arts of Islam. For 2019, he has the support of Holger A. Klein, Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor of Medieval Art History. Both times, the efforts of professor Michael Cole, department Chair, have been crucial in order to gain the Visiting Scholar designation. Also, these academic stays have been possible through two scholarships awarded by the National Council of Culture and the Arts, and by the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile.
The motivation behind these internships is to work on his PhD dissertation, entitled “Apophatic Visions: Image Theory, Deconstruction, and Depictions of the Unknowable God in Medieval Visual Culture (900-1300).” He is developing this work as a doctoral candidate in Aesthetics and Art Theory at Universidad de Chile under the supervision of Andrés Claro. His co-adviser, Herbert L. Kessler, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University was also a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in 2017 and encouraged him to choose Columbia for an academic visit: "The chance of working at Columbia’s extraordinary libraries – Butler, Avery, and of the Union Theological Seminary – has been absolutely fundamental for the proper conduction of my studies. At the same time, I have engaged in the University's community life, and I have also had meetings with the Department's faculty members who have arranged my visits,” explains Daniel. "All these experiences have benefited enormously the progresses of my PhD dissertation. In my thesis, I discuss the influence of negative theology, in particular that of Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, in the production of images both in the Latin West and the Greek East during the 10th-14th centuries and its potential relationship to contemporary continental philosophy,” he concludes.