Christiane Louise Joost-Gaugier

Art historian Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier died on January 28, 2026 in Washington, D.C. She was an internationally known scholar of Italian art and architecture and taught at numerous universities throughout her career. Dr. Joost-Gaugier was also an early leader in the movement for equality of women in academia.

Christiane Louise Joost-Gaugier was born on January 24, 1934 in Sainte-Maxime, in the province of Var, France. She came to the United States at the age of 5, with her parents, brother and sisters, as World War II began in Europe. At the time her father, Louis Clair Gaugier, a medical doctor in Paris, was involved with the French underground and helped to save Jewish colleagues from Austria and Germany, who were threatened by the Nazis, by arranging their escapes to the U.S. Her mother, Agnes Larsen Gaugier, was a former school teacher. The family moved to Montclair, New Jersey where Joost-Gaugier grew up attending the Lacordaire Academy. She went on to earn a B.A with honors, an M.A., and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Joost-Gaugier became a university professor, her first job being at Tufts University in the late 1960s. Although the term “sex discrimination” did not yet exist, she spoke out against the ways in which male and female faculty members were treated differently and, as a result, filed the first class action lawsuit in the country on behalf of all women at Tufts University. This resulted in a lengthy trial, brought by the EEOC in federal court in Boston. The suit was eventually decided in their favor, and it became “the precedent-setting case for a class action on the basis of sexual discrimination in an American university,” as cited in “Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975.”

During that time, she found that she had been labeled “a troublemaker” and even “a communist,” and she was unable to find a position; east coast universities were not willing to hire her. So Dr. Joost-Gaugier moved west to serve as a tenured full professor and Chair of the Art Department at New Mexico State University, where she established a vivacious arts community. This community then extended northward as she served for many years at the University of New Mexico as a tenured full professor and Director of the Art Department.

In 2000 she moved to Washington, D.C. to focus on research, then in 2008 she accepted a position as Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Wayne State University in Detroit. Finally returning to Washington, D.C, to continue her research and writing as an independent scholar, she continued teaching classes and seminars at George Washington University, Georgetown University, The University of Maryland College Park, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Professor Joost-Gaugier authored over 200 research publications which have appeared in various international scholarly journals, proceedings of learned societies, encyclopedias, and museum catalogues.

Her publications have spanned the many fields of her interest in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Italy. She consolidated her reputation as an established and respected scholar worldwide with publications including the books: Selected Drawings of Jacopo Bellini; Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention; Measuring Heaven: Pythagoras and his Influence on Thought and Art in Antiquity and the Middle Ages; Pitagora e il suo Influsso sul Pensiero e sull'Arte; Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven; Italian Renaissance Art: Understanding its Meaning; and Islamic Elements in the Architecture of Puglia. At the time of her death she was working on a new book entitled Wine, the Elixir of Civilization: An Introduction to the Ancient Literature of Wine.

She was the recipient of many awards including a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Delmas Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kress Foundation. She was awarded an Honorary Phi Beta Kappa for Lifetime Achievement from Harvard University in 2005.

Christiane Joost-Gaugier was full of energy in both her professional career and her personal life. She defined hospitality as a lively entertainer and an excellent cook of Italian cuisine. Her dinners and soirées were always a delightful international mix including much laughter and lively conversation with a backdrop of operatic music. She deeply touched and enriched the lives of everyone who had the privilege of being near her. She was brilliant and loving, generous, cordial, and an inspiration to everyone who knew her.

She leaves behind her two beloved daughters who she constantly championed, Leonarda Joost, of Bethel, Maine, and Nathalie Joost, of Alexandria, Virginia, and her partner and collaborator, Reade Elliott, of Washington, D.C.