K. Porter Aichele
Coordinator of Museum Studies
Art History
BA, MA Vanderbilt University
PhD Bryn Mawr
Porter Aichele is an award-winning teacher who received UNCG’s Alumni Teaching Excellence Award in 2005 and the Southeastern College Art Conference Teaching Award in 2004. She teaches 100-level survey courses in the history of western art and art in the nonwestern traditions, using exhibitions in local museums to supplement assigned textbooks. As the coordinator of the department’s museum studies program, she teaches the 500-level seminar in museum studies and supervises internships in museum and gallery settings. She also teaches graduate-level seminars in her areas of special interest, which include artists’ diaries and illustrated books.
As an active member of the International Association of Word & Image Studies (IAWIS), she regularly participates in conferences and conducts research on the reciprocity of verbal and visual languages in the arts of early 20th-century Europe. Much of her research focuses on the work of Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. At the 2005 IAWIS conference she delivered a paper entitled “Correspondence Art History, or Writing the End of Paul Klee’s Beginning of a Poem.”
Her book on Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing, published in 2002 by Cambridge University Press, explores the linguistic sources of Klee’s visual sign language, from ancient writing systems such as cuneiform to 20th-century maps. She has recently completed a companion volume devoted to Klee’s poetry – visual as well as verbal. Because much of her teaching is museum-based, she has developed a second area of scholarly interest in private collections that have been absorbed into public institutions, notably the Cone Collection in UNCG’s own Weatherspoon Art Museum.
