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Bourgeois (photo by Megan Bean | Mississippi State University)

The leader of Mississippi State’s art department is the newly elected secretary of the Italian Art Society.

Associate professor Angi Elsea Bourgeois, currently serving as interim department head, recently began a two-year term on the international scholarly organization’s board of directors.

Founded in 1987, IAS is dedicated to the study of Italian art and architecture from prehistory to the present. Serving as “a vital force in generating new knowledge about the visual arts on the Italian peninsula and neighboring islands” is its primary mission.

Since joining the society in 2004, Bourgeois has helped organize various sessions and present research papers for IAS academic conferences.

Bourgeois said she is honored to be a part of “a vital and rigorous scholarly organization that supports the creation of new knowledge about human creative endeavors.”

Of her election, Bourgeois said she is “excited to give back to the organization through my time and service, and also have the opportunity to expand my own reputation as a scholar of Italian Renaissance art.”

After graduating with honors in art history from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, she went on to complete a doctorate in Italian Renaissance and medieval art history from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bourgeois joined the ��������ò� faculty in 2002. Over the years, she has taught a variety of art history courses in the university department that is home to the Magnolia State’s largest undergraduate studio art program.

She also is the author of “Reconstructing the Lost Frescoes of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome from the ‘Meditationes’ of Cardinal Juan de Torquemada: A Case Study in the History of Art” (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009).

In 2010, she published a digital textbook for art history survey courses titled “The History of the Art of the Western World from Prehistory through the Gothic.” For more biographical information, see .

In May, Bourgeois and other members will gather for the annual IAS meeting at the University of Western Michigan’s International Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. For more, visit .