DR. NANCY WICKER
Chair of Department
Art History

MA, PhD, University of Minnesota
BA, Eastern Illinois University
email: nwicker@olemiss.edu

Beginning January 1, 2003, Dr. Nancy L. Wicker became Chair of the Department of Art at Ole Miss. She came to Mississippi from Minnesota State University, Mankato, where she was Professor of Art History and Director of the Scandinavian Studies Program. In Minnesota, she taught prehistoric, ancient, and medieval art history and archaeology, as well as Scandinavian art and a seminar on the Vikings.

Her doctoral degree is in interdisciplinary art history, archaeology, and Germanic philology from the Ancient Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. With a master’s degree in art history and an undergraduate double major in art history and art studio, she has experience with both making art and studying the history of art, which is valuable for working with visual artists, designers, art educators, and art historians in the context of a liberal arts education at Ole Miss.

Dr. Wicker continues interdisciplinary research, publishing on Scandinavian jewelry of the early medieval period, animal-style art, female infanticide during the Viking Age, runic literacy, and gendered approaches to Scandinavian art and archaeology—including co-editing two books on gender and archaeology. Recently, she has been conducting experiments with a goldsmith to reconstruct ancient jewelry techniques.

For 2001–2002, Dr. Wicker was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to trace ethnicity and gender through Scandinavian pre-Viking jewelry. This research followed up on studies supported by a NEH Summer Stipend in 2000. Her research has also been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Berit Wallenberg Foundation (Sweden), the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Norwegian Information Service. She has assisted at archaeological excavations in Sweden and Germany, and in 1992 she held an international scholarship to excavate at the Viking Age trading site of Birka in Sweden.

The Chair of the Art Department has served on the board of three scholarly societies: the International Center of Medieval Art, based at the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, and the Society of Historians of Scandinavia. She regularly presents papers and organizes sessions at the annual meetings of those societies as well as the College Art Association, the Society for American Archaeology, the Medieval Academy of America, and the European Association of Archaeologists. She has also presented invited and refereed papers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, England, Portugal, Latvia, and Russia.