Patricia Rubin Named New Director of IFA

      President John Sexton and Provost David McLaughlin recently announced the appointment of Patricia Lee Rubin as the new Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of NYU’s renowned Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), its distinguished center for research and graduate study in the history of art, archaeology, conservation, and museum curatorship. Rubin’s appointment is effective September 1, 2009.
      Rubin is currently the deputy di¬rector of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she is also a professor and head of its Research Forum.
      “The IFA’s peerless reputation derives from its unmatched ability to attract top scholars, and the appointment of Patricia Rubin as the new Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director exemplifies this tradition,” says Sexton. “In addition to her impressive leadership abilities and extraordinary reputation as a scholar, teacher, and mentor, Dr. Rubin has created one of the world’s most highly regarded advanced research programs in art history, the Courtauld Institute’s Research Forum. We welcome her to the NYU community with great pleasure and pride.”
      Rubin, an internationally ac¬claimed scholar of Italian Renaissance art and literature, began teaching at the Courtauld Institute in 1979, and was appointed deputy director and head of the Research Forum in 2004. In 1997, she served as acting director of the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence (Villa I Tatti). She has also been visiting professor there and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
      “Pat Rubin is an exciting choice for this moment in the IFA’s history,” says Judy Steinhardt, chairman of the IFA’s Board of Trustees. “Her experience as a leader at the Courtauld Institute, whose mission parallels the Institute of Fine Arts in so many ways, makes her the ideal next director of our renowned graduate program in art history, archaeology, and conservation.”
      Rubin is the author of numerous books and articles, including: Giorgio Vasari. Art and History (Yale University Press, 1995), which won the prestigious Eric Mitchell Prize, and Images and Identity in Fifteenth-century Florence (Yale University Press 2007). She has collaborated on a number of museum exhibitions in the United Kingdom and the United States, including “Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s” at the National Gallery, London. She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University in 1975, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She was awarded an M.A. with distinction from London University, Courtauld Institute of Art in 1978, and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1986.
      —John Beckman and Richard Pierce