Rate My Professor Douglas Brine

Douglas Brine, Ph.D., serves as Professor and Department Chair in the Department of Art and Art History at Trinity University, where he has been teaching since 2009. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His doctoral research focused on the art of commemoration, particularly Netherlandish wall-mounted memorials or epitaphs and their relationship to contemporary paintings by Jan van Eyck. Brine's research and teaching center on the visual arts in northern Europe during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a particular emphasis on sculpture, painting, and metalwork in the Low Countries. His secondary field of interest is the Gothic Revival in nineteenth-century England and the work of the architect and theorist Augustus Pugin.

Dr. Brine is the author of Pious Memories: The Wall-Mounted Memorial in the Burgundian Netherlands, published by Brill in 2015. His Art Bulletin article "Jan van Eyck, Canon Joris van der Paele, and the Art of Commemoration" (2014) was awarded the 2015 Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by the College Art Association. His scholarship has been supported by fellowships at the Courtauld Research Forum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. His current book project, Brazen Splendors: The Art of Brass in the Burgundian Netherlands, explores brass sculpture from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Key publications also include "The Tomb of Louis of Mâle and the Materiality of Brass in the Burgundian Netherlands" (Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 2025), "Working Sculpture: The Forms and Functions of Netherlandish Brass Lecterns" in Taking Shape: Sculpture of the Low Countries, c.1400–1600 (Brepols, 2024), "‘An unrivalled brass Lectorium’: The Cloisters Lectern and the Gothic Revival in England" (Sculpture Journal, 2020), and "Reflection and Remembrance in Jan van Eyck’s Van der Paele Virgin" (Art History, 2018). Brine teaches courses such as Art History I: Prehistoric to Medieval Art, Northern Renaissance Art in the Fifteenth Century, Jan van Eyck and his Legacy, and Museum Studies.