Lisa DeBoer: Visual Arts in the Worshipping Church

Lisa DeBoer is an art historian who, since 1999 has been teaching at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of The Visual Arts in the Worshiping Church (Eerdmans, 2016) which was the 2016 recipient of the Lilly Fellows Program’s Arlin G. Meyer Prize for academic non-fiction.

DeBoer strives to engage in academic work that can directly benefit her students and the churches from which they come. This includes cultivating an awareness of the visual environment in places of worship as well as the tangible elements and personal embodiment connected to them. Relatedly, she is intrigued by the ways that human responses of remembrance and reflection in the face of loss and trauma have poignant affinities with the experiential contours of ecclesial worship. DeBoer’s work explores how deeply embedded we humans are in the physical world, and how our habits, our physical movements, and our memories are all shaped and anchored by places and things as much as by people.

Her latest research is on the role of images in authorizing news and history in the Low Countries during the Eighty Years’ War. She’s received numerous fellowships, including a Javits and a Fulbright.

For more, see her faculty profile page here: https://www.westmont.edu/people/lisa-deboer-phd