Dr. Marilyn J. Stokstad was the Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas, a title she held from 1994 until her retirement in 2002 , the culmination of a 44-year career at KU that began in 1958 [reference:5]. Born in Lansing, Michigan in 1929, she graduated from Carleton College in 1950, spent a year at the University of Oslo as a Fulbright Fellow, took her master's at Michigan State in 1953, and completed her doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1957 with a dissertation on the Romanesque Pórtico de la Gloria of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela .
Her institutional contribution at KU was structural rather than merely exemplary. She established art history as an independent discipline within the College of Arts and Sciences, having previously been taught inside the School of Fine Arts, and she went on to implement the department's graduate programme . She chaired the department from 1961 to 1972 and simultaneously directed the KU Museum of Art , now the Spencer Museum , from 1961 to 1968, then served as the museum's curator until 1996 . From 1972 to 1976 she was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the first woman to hold that post .
That appointment followed directly from her feminism. On 4 February 1972 she was one of the February Sisters, twenty women who peacefully occupied KU's East Asian Studies building to protest gender inequality at the university . The action produced several lasting results: the founding of the Hilltop Day Care Center, the establishment of KU's Women's Studies programme and major, and Stokstad's own appointment as associate dean . Her values shaped her scholarship as well. Her survey textbook *Art History* (1995, now in its seventh edition) highlighted the creative accomplishments of women more than any previous art history survey, and it was among the first to include art from all parts of the world rather than Europe and the United States alone .
Her books ranged from the scholarly to the pedagogical: *Renaissance Art Outside of Italy* (1968), *Santiago de Compostela in the Age of the Pilgrimages* (1978, reprinted 1993), *Scottish Culture* (1981), *Gardens of the Middle Ages* (1983, with Jerry Stannard), *Medieval Art* (1986; second edition 2001), *Art: A Brief History* (2000; now in its fifth edition) and *Medieval Castles* (2005) . She served as President of the College Art Association from 1978 to 1980 , the second woman to hold that office , and as President of the International Center of Medieval Art . Her honours included the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2002), the James D. Burke Prize in Fine Arts from the Saint Louis Art Museum (1999), KU's Chancellors Club Career Teaching Award (1997) and a Governor's Arts Award as Kansas Art Educator of the Year (1997) [reference:19]. In her own words, written in 2002: *"The reason I began writing for students and for the general public was a missionary zeal to introduce the largest possible number of people to the visual arts"* [reference:20].
Dr. Stokstad's influence is measurable in a way that most academic careers are not. Generations of undergraduates encountered the discipline for the first time through her textbook , as KU's own obituary put it, 'many college students get their first exposure to art history because of University of Kansas scholar Marilyn Stokstad' [reference:21]. That is a form of scholarly reach that citation counts cannot capture, and she pursued it deliberately, describing her textbook writing as a 'missionary zeal' rather than a sideline [reference:22].
Her institutional record is equally consequential. She took art history at KU from a subject taught within a school of fine arts to an independent department with a graduate programme, and she did it while directing the university museum and chairing the department at the same time [reference:23]. When the February Sisters occupied a building in 1972 to protest gender inequality, she was among them , and the outcome included both a daycare centre and her own appointment as the College's first woman associate dean [reference:24]. It is rare to see a scholar's politics and their administrative record line up so cleanly.
Manuscripts in art history fail for familiar reasons: an object is over-interpreted, a corpus is too thin for the claim, or a theoretical frame is imported without being tested against the material. Dr. Stokstad spent a career moving between close study of Romanesque sculpture and the broad synthesis a survey demands , the two hardest registers in the discipline , and she brings that range, posthumously, to the manuscripts APC reviews.
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