Lisa Vergara has been a faculty member at Hunter since 1978, the year she received her doctorate from Columbia University. Since 2003 she has also served as a member of the art history faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY. Currently she is best known for her work on Johannes Vermeer, in particular his depictions of women; her studies posit correlations between the painter’s artistic ambitions and his female figures that run along technical, social, theoretical, and biographical lines. All of her published work has been in the areas of Dutch and Flemish art, beginning with Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape (Yale University Press, 1982), and continuing with articles on A. van Dyck, P. Bruegel the Elder, and Vermeer. She is also working on issues around figuration in selected paintings by Velázquez. Her ongoing interest lies in exploring how artists and their informed audiences define artistic values.
The courses Prof. Vergara teaches regularly on the undergraduate level include Northern Baroque Art; Southern Baroque Art; and Research Method of Art History. She has frequently coordinated “Introduction to the History of Art,” a basic humanities course offered every semester. In the Baroque field she has given many special topics courses, and on three occasions has co-taught, with Prof. D. Conchado of the Romance Language Department, an honors seminar entitled “Quill and Brush in Golden-Age Spain: Cervantes and Velázquez.” On the graduate level she regularly teaches Baroque Art, a lecture-and-discussion course on changing topics designed to introduce students to 17th-century art; and seminars on a wide variety of topics (recently, for example, “Art and Domesticity in 17th-Century Holland;” “Velázquez”). The subjects of M. A. theses she has directed in the last few years include: From Rome to Utrecht: Honthorst’s Nativities and His International Career; Woman at a Wicker Cradle in 17th-Century Dutch Painting; The Still Lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán; Vagrants and Beggars in Netherlandish Art of the 16th and 17th Centuries; The Provenance of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Months, Reconsidered; and Rembrandt’s Images of Fathers and Sons.
Prof. Vergara has long been an active member of CAA and Historians of Netherlandish Art, and more recently of The Renaissance Society of America. In 2006 the University of Amsterdam Press published a collection of over thirty essays that she co-edited with A. Golahny and M.M. Mochizuki (In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias).
Prof. Vergara has been both graduate and undergraduate advisor, the latter on a frequent basis.
