Associate Provost for Academic Affairs Dr. Heidi Kraus collaborates with Hope College deans and faculty to identify opportunities to support faculty in their teaching and scholarship and to enhance Hope’s academic program. Programs she supervises include summer research, General Education and the Klooster Center for Writing and Research. She was appointed as associate provost in 2022.

She is an associate professor of art history specializing in art from the Early Modern through Contemporary periods, and has served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and as director of Hope’s DePree Gallery. A student of Dorothy Johnson, she has published on the work of Jacques-Louis David. In 2017 her book with Nicholas K. Rauh, A Short History of the Ancient World, was published by University of Toronto Press. Her current research project, Lessons to My Students: On Art History and Why it Matters, is under contract with University of Toronto Press.

Areas of Expertise

Dr. Kraus’s current teaching and research focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century iconography in contemporary French visual culture, and she has developed a number of related grant-funded initiatives. Kraus co-founded and co-directs the Hope College Paris May Term, an interdisciplinary, faculty-led study abroad program focusing on outsiders and identity in French culture. In 2017, she and a student canvassed Parisian neighborhoods identified as rich in street art and/or sites of memory following terrorist attacks two years earlier, photographed street art, and analyzed and digitally mapped those projects and others in the city. With colleagues in Hope’s history and English departments, she was among the developers of six collaboratively-taught “Paris Stories” courses focused on national identity and the role in Paris of so-called “outsiders.” She also co-coordinated the college’s “Challenging Borders” program (2016–2018), in which students and faculty from all of Hope’s academic divisions engaged in projects that explored themes of migration, displaced persons and refugees. Kraus served as the director of global learning for the General Education program from 2020–2022.

Education

• Ph.D., art history, The University of Iowa, 2010
• M.A., art history, The University of Iowa, 2004
• BFA, graphic design, Drake University, 2002

honors, grants, awards, & published works

• “Mexican Colonial and Modern Art, History and Popular Culture,” Great Lakes Colleges Association Global Crossroads Initiative grant, 2018
• Andrew M. Mellon Foundation Grand Challenges Initiative grant (3-year grant), Hope College, 2017
• Nyenhuis Faculty-Student Collaborative grant, Hope College, 2017
• Innovation Award, Hope College, 2017
• Curriculum grant, Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan, 2016
• Towsley Summer Research Stipend, Hope College, 2015–2016

Selected Publications

• “Looking to the Past: Street Art, Public Spaces and Contemporary French Identity,” in Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times: The Revolution Will Be Live! (ed. by E. Schruers and K. Olson), Routledge, 2019
• A Short History of the Ancient World (with Nicholas K. Rauh), University of Toronto Press, 2017
• “Architecture and Memory in Jacques-Louis David's ‘Sabine Women,’” Art Inquiry, 2017
• “View from the Luxembourg: David and the French Landscape Tradition,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 2015
• “David’s Roman ‘Vedute,’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 2009

Outside the College

Heidi enjoys traveling internationally with her family, cheering on the Iowa Hawkeyes, visiting the lakeshore and being at home with her two dogs and two cats. Whenever possible, she loves visiting museums and exposing others to her love of art and culture.