Debora Silverman, professor of history and art history at UCLA and the University of California Presidential Chair in Modern European History, received a 2015 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Article Award.
Her article titled “Diasporas of Art: History, the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium, 1885–2014,” published in the Journal of Modern History in September 2015, examined the history and current controversies of Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, which was opened in 1910 by King Leopold II and commemorated in 2005.
Since receiving a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1983, Silverman has published diverse works spanning the fields of history, architecture, politics, psychology and art, as well as covering such notable figures as Sigmund Freud and Vincent Van Gogh. She is the author of “Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and The New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America” (Pantheon, 1986); “Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style” (University of California Press, 1989), which was a co-winner of the Berkshire History prize; and “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), which was awarded a Ralph Waldo Emerson National Prize for Best Book in the Humanities and a PEN American Center Architectural Digest Prize for "outstanding writing on the visual arts."
