Francis H. Dowley is a Professor Emeritus in the Art History Department at the University of Chicago. He received his BA from Princeton University in 1936, his MA in Philosophy, also from Princeton University (1941), and his PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago (1955). Dowley’s work focused on French Baroque art, and he was specifically interested in making visible understudied aspects of the Baroque period. Dowley spent his entire career at the University of Chicago and became a full professor in 1974.

A key figure in the field of Roman sculpture and wall painting, von Blanckenhagen was part of the wave of postwar refugee scholars who invigorated the study of art history in the United States. He earned his doctorate at the University of Munich in 1936 but faced increasing discrimination in Germany thanks to his Latvian citizenship. At the instigation of Otto von Simson, he left his position as docent at the University of Marburg to take a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago between 1947 and 1949.

Born into a prosperous family of philosophers, scientists, and statesmen, Otto Georg von Simson fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1945. Appointed to the Committee on Social Thought, he occasionally taught classes in the Department of Art. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1951, served as the committee’s Executive Secretary, edited Measure: A Critical Journal and, in 1946, helped found the Committee for Aid to German and Austrian Scholars.

Medieval art historian Margaret Rickert served on the University of Chicago faculty between 1938-1954. Primarily known for her contributions to English manuscript studies and the study of English medieval art more broadly, she also worked as a code breaker during World War II and contributed to a long-running research project devoted to the life and work of the medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, undertaken by her sister Edith Rickert (herself a member of the University's English Department).

The famed symbologist Edgar Wind has the distinction of being Erwin Panofsky’s first dissertator; his dissertation, written on art historical methodology, was closely supervised by Ernst Cassirer as well.  Wind also took classes with the Vienna School’s Max Dvorak, Julius Von Schlosser, and Josef Strzygowski.

Edmund Giesbert, a German-born painter and illustrator, taught in the Department of Art at the University of Chicago starting in 1927. Before arriving at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute where he also taught classes, Giesbert was trained at the Vienna Academy and the Art Institute of Chicago. He became known for combining Impressionist and Expressionist styles in his boldly colored paintings, prints, and book illustrations.