Diane Favro, a professor in department of architecture and urban design at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, has been named the 2017– 18 Samuel H. Kress Professor by the National Gallery. The one-year position was established in 1965 with the support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
The Kress professorship is one of four prestigious professorships appointed each year by the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. In addition to pursuing independent research, the Kress Professor is the senior member of the CASVA and counsels six predoctoral fellows. Throughout the year, Favro plans to pursue her own research on Roman arches as infrastructural propaganda.
Favro joined the UCLA faculty in 1984. She was the founding director of UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center and has served as UCLA Arts’ associate dean of academic affairs. Favro will retire from UCLA at the end of June.
Favro is UCLA’s first professor to be named a Kress Professor, but not the campus’s only connection to the position. When the professorship was established, the Kress foundation was led by Franklin D. Murphy, UCLA’s chancellor at the time.
Favro joins an impressive group of scholars who have been Kress professors. Previous honorees have come from the Louvre Museum, Yale University, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and Freie Universitat in Berlin.
