David Bjelajac

David Bjelajac is Professor of Art History and American Studies at The George Washington University.  He primarily teaches the history of North American art and visual culture.  His books include  American Art: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall, 2000; 2nd edition, 2005); Washington Allston: Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988).  Professor Bjelajac also has published on American painting and sculpture in relation to the history of religion, science, freemasonry and hermetic, esoteric traditions, including: “Honey from the Louvre: Gleaning God’s Word from the Old Masters,” in Samuel F. B. Morse’s ‘Gallery of the Louvre’ and the Art of Invention, ed. P. J. Brownlee (Terra Foundation of American Art and Yale, 2014);  “Masonic Fraternalism and Muhammad Among the Lawgivers in Adolph Weinman’s Sculpture Frieze for the United States Supreme Court (1931-1935),” in The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology, eds. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (De Gruyter, 2014); and “Mercurial Pigments and the Alchemy of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” in Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, Vol. 9: Analyzing Art and Aesthetics, eds. Anne Collins Goodyear and Margaret A. Weitekamp (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2013).  Professor Bjelajac’s current book project explores Copley’s paintings in relation to freemasonry, Protestant millennialism, Orientalism and the imperial trope of history’s westward course.