September 14, 2015

We are pleased to announce Dr. Elizabeth Milroy’s appointment as the Department Head of Art & Art History. Dr. Milroy brings to Drexel tremendous expertise as an academic leader, scholar, and curator. She previously served as Dean of Humanities at Wesleyan University, and since 2012, she has been the Zoë and Dean Pappas Curator of Education, Public Programs, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With an expertise in American art and material culture and a special focus on the history of cultural institutions in Philadelphia, Dr. Milroy’s interdisciplinary approach engages history, society, cultures, and their relationship to art. Dr. Milroy additionally had appointments at Wesleyan as Director of the Art History program and as chair of American Studies. She previously served as Curator at the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago, and she has worked on major exhibitions for the National Gallery of Canada, the Clark Art Institute, the Brooklyn Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Department, which is home to the new undergraduate Art History major, will benefit greatly from both Dr. Milroy’s extensive scholarly achievements as well as her many years of experience in the arts and culture sector.

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she administered the museum’s extensive offerings of public programs including lectures, symposia and performances, and she led the implementation of the museum’s new Wednesdays Pay-What-You-Wish initiative. While serving as Dean of the Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan, where she taught from 1988-2012, Dr. Milroy oversaw the departments of Art & Art History, Film Studies, Theater, Music, and Dance, as well as Classics, the College of Letters, East Asian Languages and Literature, English, German Studies, Romance Languages and Literature and Russian, in addition to the Davison Art Center, the Language Resource Center and the Center for the Humanities.

Dr. Milroy received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She has authored, co-authored, or edited five books as well as numerous articles and essays published in leading journals in the field. She lectures widely, and has received support three times from the National Endowment for the Humanities and twice from the Mellon Foundation. She has served as the executive editor of Winterthur Portfolio, the esteemed journal published by the Winterthur Museum and Gardens and the University of Chicago Press. In addition to her appointment as Department Head, Dr. Milroy is joining Drexel University as a Full Professor.