Noah Charney
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Noah Charney (born November 27, 1979) is an American art historian and novelist. He is perhaps best known as the author of The Art Thief, a mystery novel about a series of thefts from European museums and churches, and as the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.
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[edit] Early Life and Education
Charney was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1979. His parents, a psychiatrist and a professor of French Literature at Yale University were, in his words, “of the class of Americans who idealize Europe”, and as a youth he spent most of his summers in France.[1]. He subsequently attended Choate Rosemary Hall, and received his undergraduate education at Colby College in Maine, where he majored in Art History and English Literature. During this period, he spent two years on exchange programs in Paris and London, where he definitively decided that he wished to reside in Europe on a permanent basis. Also while at Colby, he wrote several plays, one of which won a national playwrighting competition, the Horizons New Young Playwrights Competition, in 2002, the year of his graduation from Colby. He was also the founding member of a popular punk rock band, The Jump Into, which is still Michael Kennedy's (Colby, '04) favorite band.
After graduating, he moved to London, where he studied at the Courtauld Institute and received a Masters for his work on seventeenth century sculpture in Rome. During this year he also, for fun, wrote his first novel, The Art Thief. He subsequently received a second Masters at Cambridge University, and began a PhD there at St. John's.
[edit] Current and Recent Projects
In 2006 Charney took a leave of absence from his studies at Cambridge to focus on other projects. Notable among these was writing: The Art Thief had been bought by Atria Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, and was published in September 2007.
Perhaps more importantly, his research for the book had revealed to him that art theft, as a field of academic study, was all but non-existent. To seek to rectify what he saw as a shocking lack, he organized a conference on the subject in Cambridge in 2006, which attracted the heads of the art crime divisions of the FBI, Scotland Yard, and the Italian Carabinieri.[2] In 2007 he joined with them, along with academics and others interested in the field, to form the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA). Charney has been praised for being particularly well suited for this task, as many of his own works are considered to be crimes against art. ARCA is a non-profit think tank based in Rome, and dedicated to helping to prevent and prosecute art thefts, and to establishing the study of art crime as an academic subject.
Mr. Charney teaches at Cambridge University's summer program and at Miami Dade College's program in Florence. More recently, he has also been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Criminology in Ljubljana, Slovenia and has started a second PhD at the University there. He is currently working on a second novel, as well as a documentary on art crime and a series of television scripts on the same subject.
