HENRY M. WIESENFELD, A&S 1928, was a Baltimore native and successful businessman. During his senior year at Johns Hopkins, Mr. Wiesenfeld assumed management of his family’s saddlery and sporting goods business upon his father’s death. Under Mr. Wiesenfeld’s leadership, the company continued to prosper. Eventually, he closed its store at Howard and Baltimore streets but continued to operate a mail-order saddlery business. He sold the business in the early 1960s and became comptroller for a local printing firm.
Mr. Wiesenfeld attributed his philanthropy to Johns Hopkins University to his deeply held belief in the importance of higher education. He was profoundly grateful for his own education at Johns Hopkins and the impact it had on his life. Another possible motivation for his gift was the special history between his grandfather and Mr. Johns Hopkins. Mr. Hopkins once extended an interest-free loan to Mr. Wiesenfeld’s grandfather, enabling him to re-establish himself following the Civil War.
Mr. Wiesenfeld died on December 2, 2004; his wife, ELIZABETH P. WIESENFELD, died in 1990. The two professorships honoring Mr. and Mrs. Wiesenfeld were established through their estates.
HO-FUNG HUNG is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Associate Professor in Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins University. He researches global political economy, protest, and nationalism. He is the author of the award-winning Protest with Chinese Characteristics (2011) and The China Boom: Why China Will not Rule the World (2016), both published by Columbia University Press. His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Development and Change, Review of International Political Economy, Asian Survey, and elsewhere. His research publications have been translated into six different languages, and are recognized by awards from five different sections of the American Sociological Association, Social Science History Association, and the World Society Foundation of Switzerland. His analyses of the Chinese political economy and Hong Kong politics have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, The Financial Times, BBC News, The Guardian, Le Monde (France), Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil), RT (Russia), The Straits Times (Singapore), The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Xinhua Monthly (China), and People’s Daily (China), among others.
STEPHEN J. CAMPBELL is the Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He received a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Dublin, a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina, and a PhD from Johns Hopkins. Before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 2002, he taught at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. A central concern of his work on painting and sculpture in Italy is the historical investigation of what we call “style” and its role in visual communication, as well as questions of canon formation and the geography of art. He has published Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style and Politics in the Renaissance City 1450-1495, and The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este, as well as editing several volumes of collected studies. In 1993, Dr. Campbell published a book for a general audience called The Great Irish Famine of 1847-1851, with a preface by President Mary Robinson of Ireland. In 2002, he was guest curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, for the exhibition Cosmè Tura: Painting and Design in Renaissance Ferrara, and again in 2015-16, for the exhibition Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice. His most recent book Art in Italy 1400-1600, co-authored with Michael Cole (2011), has appeared in Japanese and Italian, and a revised and extended edition will appear later this year. He has held post-doctoral fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, and The Clark Institute, Williamstown MA.