Dr. Victoria C.G. Coates
Cultural Historian and Ph.D
Victoria C. G. Coates is a cultural historian who received her Ph.D. from The University of Pennsylvania specializing in Italian renaissance art. Dr. Coates’ research focuses on issues of self-fashioning and reception, interests that unite projects ranging from new interpretations of Cellini’s Autobiography and Raphael’s Transfiguration to a reassessment of the modern reception of Pompeii and Herculaneum. She has contributed to conferences and symposia in the United States and Europe, and her work has appeared in The Sixteenth-Century Journal, Gazette des Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Studies. Dr. Coates co-edited the 2007 volume Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and she is currently co-curator and catalog author for the exhibition The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection opening in 2012 at the Getty Villa in Malibu before travelling to the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a director of the blog Redstate.com, Dr. Coates has published extensively online, covering national security and foreign policy. After travelling to Baghdad on behalf of Redstate in 2007, Dr. Coates accepted the position of Director of Research for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and provided editorial support and content analysis for Mr. Rumsfeld’s New York Times best-selling memoir Known and Unknown (2011). In addition, Dr. Coates managed the release of primary documents from Mr. Rumsfeld’s private papers on the website www.rumsfeld.com, prompting the Wall Street Journal to praise the project as “the first political memoir of the Information Age.” In September, 2011, Dr. Coates joined the Rick Perry presidential campaign as an advisor for foreign policy. In March, 2013 she became the senior advisor for national security in the office of Senator Ted Cruz (Texas). In September, 2015 she became the senior advisor for national security for Senator Cruz’ 2016 presidential campaign. She also served as staff coordinator for Senator Cruz’ New York Times best-selling memoir A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America (2015). Dr. Coates has served as a senior fellow at the Commonwealth Foundation, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a consulting curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In January, 2016 Encounter Press published David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art. This ten-chapter study examines intersections between the fine arts and free systems of government in the Western tradition with the goal of learning from history as we try to foster democracy today. Key objects include the Parthenon, Michelangelo’s David, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the Elgin Marbles and Picasso’s Guernica. The Wall Street Journal described David’s Sling as “engaging and accessible…clear and convincing.” Dr. Coates lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two children and two dogs.
