Lois Pattison de Menil
Lois Pattison de Menil (born 15 May 1938) is a historian, arts administrator, educator, And Co-founder of the Center for Khmer Studies in Cambodia.
Early Years
Born in New York, as Lois Ames Pattison to Charles Krone Pattison and Julia Hassan, Dr. de Menil grew up in Garden City, New York. She played violin to a professional level as a child, taking classes at The Juilliard School and performing Bach’s Double Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall. At 16, she traveled by boat to Paris and developed a love of French history, which led her to pursue studies of French history and politics at a higher level.
After graduating with high honors from Wellesley College in 1960, Lois Pattison traveled to Paris with funding from the Fulbright program to simultaneously pursue two master’s degrees in law and political science, at the Faculte de Droit de Paris and Sciences Po. She also received a fellowship from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to study law at the Hague Academy of International Law. She then enrolled at Harvard University for in a PhD, supervised by Stanley Hoffman, focusing on the politics of the emergent European Union. She was awarded a scholarship by the Social Science Research Council to learn German and pursue her thesis research in Berlin.["The Place of Germany in De Gaulle's Europe", Harvard, 1972.]
On return to the US, she married George de Menil in August 1968, and she had two of four children when she completed her PhD in 1972.
Foreign Policy Specialist
Dr. de Menil published her PhD, in 1978, as the book “Who Speaks for Europe? The Vision of Charles de Gaulle.”. She taught French history and literature,international law and political science at Harvard College, the University of Massachusetts, Boston and Princeton University, during which time she collaborated on the book, “Pan Africanism in Action: An Account of the UAM” (African and Malagasy Union) with Albert Teveodjré and translated into English “French Foreign Policy under de Gaulle” by Alfred Grosser
Her academic work on foreign policy earned Dr. de Menil memberships in the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the “Institut Français des Relations Internationales” in Paris, and the American Council on Germany.
Patron of the Arts
In the 1980s, Dr. de Menil devoted her energies to the arts. From European painting to ballet by way of architecture. She distinguished herself on the boards of major East-Coast American arts institutions. In 1981, she co-curated an exhibition of American art at the Grand Palais in Paris, "L'Amerique aux Independants". She served on boards of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (vice chair of Trustees Counci)l, the School of American Ballet in New York, the Dia Art Foundation, the “Festival d’Automne” in Paris, the Harvard Art Museums, the World Monuments Fund, and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which she helped to establish. Her tenure as vice- chair of the Dia board saw the organization transformed from an exceptional collection without an audience to a series of discrete single-artist venues in lower Manhattan open to a thriving public. With the Harvard Art Museum Board of Overseers' Visiting Committee to the Art Museums, she contributed to the development of plans for a new museum, designed by Renzo Piano, a project ultimately vetoed by the Cambridge community. Renzo Piano subsequently redesigned the Fogg Museum at Harvard, to be reopened in Fall 2014.
In 1996, Dr. de Menil moved to Bucharest, Romania, where she became adviser to the Romanian Minister of Culture, counselling on protection of the national patrimony. In particular, she fought, together with a group of Romanian colleagues, to preserve the Sculptural Ensemble of Constantin Brâncuși at Târgu Jiu, most noted for its “Endless Column.” In addition, she supported the drafting of legislation to preserve historical monuments, so as to prevent further destruction of the sort ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu. She coordinated the reopening of the [National Museum of Romania], closed by fire during the revolution against Ceaucescu. In recognition of her contributions, Dr. de Menil was named to the Romanian Legion of Honor in 2000, and in 2001, she joined the Executive Committee of the Romanian National Heritage Trust, [Pro Patrimonio].
Promoter of Education
Alongside her work in the arts, Dr. de Menil has remained committed to promoting education, both in the United States and abroad. From 1992-2004, she served on the board of the [Groton School], an elite private boarding school in Massachusetts, contributing to the expansion of its arts teaching and creating in 2001 an art gallery open to the public, the [de Menil Gallery] Meanwhile, her trusteeship at the [World Monuments’ Fund] (1989–present) drew her closer to Cambodia, where the organization was conserving the Preah Khan temple, part of the temple complex at Angkor.
A major challenge in Cambodia was the weakness of higher educational institutions. [Pol Pot]’s Khmer Rougeregime had targeted institutions of higher learning between 1975 and 1979, [...] intellectuals and leaving little prospect of a new cadre of professionals coming to fill the gap. This led Dr. de Menil to fsponsor the founding by the [World Monuments Fund] of the Center for Khmer Studies,in 1999, with seed funding from the [Henry Luce Foundation],the [Rockefeller Foundation] and the [Sainsbury Foundation].
Today, the [Center for Khmer Studies] is home to two libraries, one for researchers and one for younger students and children,and a conference center set on the premises of a Buddhist monastery, Wat Damnak, in Siem Reap, Cambodia.The Center for Khmer Studies research library forms a quadrangle on the pagoda grounds in the manner of the campus of a U.S. university. CKS serves as an academic hub for both foreign (particularly American and French) and Cambodian students and scholars, offering workshops and seminars, research facilities,publishing books in Khmai and an annual scholarly journal,["Siksacakr: the Journal of Cambodia Studies"], and sponsoring among other programs the re-catloguing and posting online of the full inventory of the [National Museum of Cambodia], with funding from the [Leon Levy Foundation]. Dr. de Menil's efforts have sought to embed CKS within a wider network of institutions of academic excellence, reaching from Europe and the US across Southeast Asia.