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Name: Cole, Bruce
Current Position: former Chairman
Bruce Cole received a BA from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1962, an MA in 1964 from Oberlin College, and a Ph.d in 1969 from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. He spent two years as the William E. Suida Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He has also held fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies; the American Philosophical Society; the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Guggenheim Foundation; and the Kress Foundation. In addition, he received an NEH Fellowship to research early Florentine paintings, and subsequently served as a panelist in NEH’s peer review system, and as a member for seven years of the National Council on the Humanities, to which he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in April 1992. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, appointed Cole chairman of the National Endowment for Humanities in 2001. Cole served out his second four-year term in 2009.
Cole was also founder and former Co-President of the Association for Art History. In addition, he was a Professor at the University of Rochester, New York, and taught for twenty-eight years at Indiana University in Bloomingdale, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Art History and Professor of Comparative Literature.
Cole has written fourteen books, many about the Renaissance. They include: Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-Modernism; Italian Art 1250-1550; The Relation of Art to Life and Society; The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian; Titian and Venetian Art, 1450-1590; and most recently, The Informed Eye: Understanding Masterpieces of Western Art.