Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.—A highly respected faculty member and administrator in Mississippi State’s Department of Art has been named the new dean of the university’s College of Architecture, Art and Design, pending formal approval by the Board of Trustees, State Institutions of Higher Learning.

Effective July 1, Professor Angi Elsea Bourgeois will lead CAAD after serving nearly two years as the head of its Department of Art, home to the Magnolia State’s largest undergraduate studio art program. She succeeds the college’s founding dean Jim West, one of DesignIntelligence’s 25 Most Admired Educators for 2016 who has resumed full-time teaching duties.

In making the announcement, MSU Provost and Executive Vice President Judy Bonner said Bourgeois “is poised to build on the solid foundation that has been established and the progress of the college’s first 14 years.”

“I look forward to working with Angi as she uses her energy and vision to bring the collective talents of the faculty, students, alumni and industry leaders together to make the College of Architecture, Art and Design even stronger and more visible within our great state, the region and nation,” Bonner said.

“I also want to thank Dean Jim West for the leadership he has provided as the founding dean of this unique college. He has led with distinction and garnered strong support for the college, its faculty and academic programs, and we are so pleased that he will continue to support the college and MSU as a faculty member,” Bonner said.

An MSU faculty member since 2002, Bourgeois has taught a variety of art history courses and climbed the academic ranks with a promotion to professor coinciding with her appointment as art department head. She was re-elected to a two-year term in January as secretary for the Italian Art Society, an international scholarly organization that she joined in 2004.

“It’s a great privilege to be given this opportunity to follow in Dean West’s very capable footsteps,” Bourgeois said. “The College of Architecture, Art and Design has supported me throughout my career, and I’m excited to step into this new role and serve the college at such a dynamic moment.”

In addition to graduating with honors in art history from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, Bourgeois holds a doctorate in Italian Renaissance and medieval art history from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

She is the author of “Reconstructing the Lost Frescoes of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome from the ‘Meditationes’ of Cardinal Juan de Torquemada: A Case Study in the History of Art” (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). In 2010, she published a digital textbook for art history survey courses titled “The History of the Art of the Western World from Prehistory through the Gothic.”

Learn more about MSU’s College of Architecture, Art and Design at www.caad.msstate.edu, as well as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @CAADatMSU.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.