New art professor joins faculty

By Michael Bachmann Assistant Editor

After living in Austria for more than a decade, Assistant Professor of Art Christina Chakalova has made Hillsdale her new home.

children with a well-rounded education, so, unsurprisingly, students have and continue to perform well on the Iowa standardized test,” Budd said.

Roberts said the COVID-19 shutdowns in the spring of 2020 were difficult, but he feels the students are back to their previous level of work.

“We were able to build some skill and knowledge with the partnership with our parents,” he said. “While it wasn’t that ideal, we were able to salvage something, even in that horrible spring.”

Budd agreed that Academy students were fortunate to have only missed a few months of school, but she noted that the COVID-19 lockdowns still have an effect on students transferring from other schools.

“We have noted a decline in preparedness and grade readiness from some new students enrolling from schools who did remote learning for a longer time,” Budd said.

Budd and Roberts said these tests are not the only way of seeing how the school is doing.

“While we are very proud of these test scores, and we take these into consideration, this is by far not the only measuring stick of a successful school,” Roberts said.

Chakalova, who earned her Ph.D. at Rutgers University in 2021, replaced Barbara Bushey as the new art history professor following Bushey’s retirement last spring.

“This is my dream job,” Chakalova said. “I started off at a place like Hillsdale and that was inspirational to me. I wanted to become a professor like my own professors.

I always knew that I was doing this to land a job at an undergraduate institution.”

Junior art minor Mary McGovern said Chakalova's care for her students is apparent.

“She is a really great lecturer and does a good job keeping us engaged,” McGovern said. “She even brought us cookies and coffees to keep us going.”

After majoring in art and religious studies at Lafayette College, Chakalova earned a master’s in art history while studying in Vienna. In 2015, she enrolled in Rutgers Ph.D. program, which allowed her to study further in Austria.

“Austria is one of the birthplaces of the discipline of art history,” said Chakalova, who is of Austrian descent. “It was a completely opposite experience to what I had in undergraduate. When I got to Vienna, nobody held my hand, no one knew that I existed.”

Chakalova’s professional focus is in the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque. She wrote her dissertation on Prince Eugene of Savoy, the field commander for the Holy Roman Emperor who defeated the Ottomans in 1697.

“He was one of the richest men in Europe, and if he wasn't fighting wars, he was commissioning art,” Chakalova said. “What I looked at was his palace in Vienna and how he moved art objects and artists from across the globe to Vienna to create this beautiful garden palace.”

According to Chakalova, Eugene’s patronage of the arts and role in establishing peace in central Europe helped to contribute to the late Baroque.

Chakalova said her love of the arts developed at an early age.

“Growing up, I had professional artists and musicians in my family,” Chakalova said. “My mom is a professor of German language and literature, so she also took us along to all these cultural monuments, which made a great impression on me growing up.”

After going on a school-sponsored trip to Greece in high school, Chakalova said she fell in love with the relationship of art, culture, and history.

Following the trip, Chakalova took a class in classical mythology that further solidified her love of the subject.

“That experience made me realize I really love art and culture,” Chakalova said.

“From that point forward, I started to take private art lessons with representational artists, and I continued to take courses on classical methodology and history, which then morphed into an interest in the Renaissance and Baroque.

Chakalova’s Austrian heritage also contributed to her passion for art history, she said.

“My mom is Austrian,” Chakalova said. “You get so much from your mother — the language, the food, the traditions. We don’t eat Turkey at Thanksgiving, we make ‘schweinebraten’ every year.”

Chakalova spent every summer at family’s village in Austria, where her grandfather and uncles work as rural vets tending to farm animals.

“It was tiny, and it made Hillsdale look like a metropolis,” Chakalova said.

Despite its size, the village was filled with history, including a renaissance-era castle.

“In Europe, everything is so old, even my uncle’s house is from the Middle Ages,” Chakalova said. “Here we don’t think as much about culture history because the objects are not there that tell us about it.”

Chakalova hopes to immerse her students in the environments that they are learning about.

“There's a reason that we go on vacation to Hawaii, and we don't just look at the beautiful picture of a beach in Hawaii. It's not the same thing.”

Last weekend, Chakalova brought her art history classes to the Toledo Museum of Art institute so they could view some of the works they have studied in class.

“The trip enhanced our study of the Renaissance because art is meant to be seen in person,” junior and art history minor Claire Hipkins said.