Hamlin, Gladys E.

Professor of Art History at Iowa State University, 1949-1973. Gladys Eva Hamlin (1902-1986) was born in Sioux Falls, S.D. She studied at the University of Chicago, receiving her Ph. B. degree in 1926. She taught in high schools in Sioux Falls, S.D. and Manning, Iowa until 1931. Entering Columbia University, she pursued a Master of Arts degree in art history. During the summer of 1936 she studied at the Courtauld Institute, University of London on a scholarship from the Institute of International Education. After receiving her master's degree from Columbia in 1937, she accepted a teaching position in the history of art at Duke University, 1938-1939.

During the Second World War period she served as research assistant on two important assignments: the American Council of Learned Society's Committee for the Preservation of Art in War Areas (1944-45), and the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas (1945-46). The former committee gathered information on the looting and damage of art while the work of the latter commission furnished the U.S. Armed Forces with detailed country by country manuals and maps locating irreplaceable artistic treasures in Europe and Japan. From 1946-1949 Prof. Hamlin served as a docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She accepted a position as Associate Professor at Iowa State University in 1949 teaching survey courses in the history of art.

Publications include: "Mural painting in Iowa" (her master's thesis, later issued in the July 1939 issue of the Iowa journal of history and politics, and considered a landmark study of the WPA art work created in Iowa during the Great Depression); a series of articles for the College art journal from 1945-46 in which she related the problems of protecting art works during WWII and the later return of looted art; and her 1969 book The sculpture of Fred and Mabel Torry which brought overdue recognition to a sculpture team much beloved in the Midwest.