Dr. Arne R. Flaten, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Coastal Carolina University, has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA). He is the first professor in the University’s history to receive this distinction, and the first in the state of South Carolina.

Based in Salzburg, Austria, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts is an interdisciplinary network of leading world scholars and thinkers from various fields who focus on scientific, social, cultural, and ethical issues concerning Europe and the world. The Academy presently brings together over 1500 scientists and researchers, philosophers and artists from Europe, Asia and the USA, including 29 Nobel Prize winners. The Academy’s website can be found here.

Arne Flaten graduated from St. Olaf College in Minnesota with a double major in studio art and English literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After teaching in Israel and Rwanda, he earned his MA and Ph.D. in art history from Indiana University at Bloomington. Flaten’s research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; the J. Paul Getty Research Institute; and the Renaissance Society of America. In addition to numerous articles on Renaissance sculpture and portraiture, and a book, Medals and Plaquettes 15th to 20th Centuries (2012), Flaten is co-founder of an innovative project called Ashes2Art, which digitally reconstructs monuments of the ancient world. Flaten was the HTC Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Lecturer at Coastal Carolina University in 2013, and delivered the Commencement address at the August graduation in 2014.