Former Students

Mal Ahern     

Randall Albers     
Kenneth Allan
Samuel Baker
James E. Brunson III
Samuel Baker
Anna Brzyski
Valeria Cammarata
Kris Cohen
Benjamin David
Rebecca DeRoo
Timothy Erwin
Robert Friedman
Maki Fukuoka
David Grubbs 
Ming Dong Gu 

Current Students

Eduardo de Almeida

David Alworth

Mal Ahern

malahern@gmail.com

Mal Ahern works in the collection of Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, where she recently helped complete a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project to catalog the Museum's silent- and early sound-era holdings. Currently she works on the care and documentation of the Museum's collection of over 100,000 objects related to film, TV, and digital media.
Mal is also a student at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is working on a Master's in film studies. Her interests include film historiography, early cinema, and the 1960s (especially the work of Andy Warhol). She is especially interested in the historical and theoretical intersections between film and photography.
 

Randall Albers

Chair

Fiction Writing Department

Columbia College Chicago

600 South Michigan Ave.

Chicago, IL 60605

ralbers@popmail.colum.edu

Randall Albers chairs the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago,home to the Story Workshop approach and one of the largest graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs in the country.  He is also founding producer of the Story Week Festival of Writers, now one of Chicago's largest literary festivals. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, Northfield Magazine, Mendocino Review, F Magazine, Writing From Start to Finish, and elsewhere.  A chapter from his novel-in-progress, All the World Before Them, appearing in the Summer 2001 issue of F Magazine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Selections from his roundtable discussion with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Bharati Mukherjee, April Sinclair, Don De Grazia, and Geling Yan, "Censorship and the Writer's Voice," is forthcoming in F Magazine (Fall 2002).  He is also co-writer and co-producer of the Story Workshop creative writing video tapes, "The Living Voice Moves" and Story from First Impulse to Final Draft," and has appeared at numerous national conferences on writing and the teaching of writing.  A Certified Story Workshop Master Teacher, he is a former recipient of the Columbia College Teaching Excellence Award.
 

Kenneth D. Allan 

Assistant Professor of Art History

Seattle University

Department of Fine Arts

901 12th Avenue

P.O. Box 222000

Seattle, WA 98122-1090

http://www.seattleu.edu/artsci/finearts/faculty/allan.html

allank@seattleu.edu

Ken Allan is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Seattle University who specializes in post-WWII American & European art. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2005. Recent upper-division courses and seminars have included, "Space & Site in Contemporary Art" and "Art of the 1960s: Origins of Postmodernism."
He is currently working on a book on artistic practice, social space and spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles. Recent publications include a book review of Cecile Whiting's Pop L. A.: Art and the City in the 1960s for Art Journal and an essay on the notion of the avant-garde in 1950s Los Angeles in Archives of American Art Journal. He has also published catalog essays on Lee Lozano and David Reed in Blanton Museum of Art: American Art since 1900 (University of Texas at Austin, 2006), and articles and reviews on figures such as Ed Ruscha, Walter Hopps, Tim Hawkinson and Mark Allen in X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly (where Allan is on the editorial board).
He has presented his work at conferences in the UK, Canada and the US. In 2007-2008, he was invited to speak at the Getty Center for the conference "Cote a Cote-Coast to Coast: Art and Jazz in France and California," and at a symposium accompanying the Ed Ruscha and Photography exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Samuel Baker 

Associate Professor

Department of English

University of Texas

Austin, TX 78713

sebaker@mail.utexas.edu

In his just-published book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture, Professor Baker argues that the Romantic idea of universal culture took shape within imaginative horizons fundamentally shaped by Britain’s maritime-imperial aspirations. Dr. Baker is also writing a series of essays on ethical dispositions in the Romantic novel, tracking how stoicism and skepticism, among other attitudes, ceased to refer to specific philosophical schools and began to be seen as general psychological orientations.
Before returning to academia to take his Ph.D., Professor Baker worked as a journalist and book reviewer, as well as in museums and libraries. These experiences left him something of a generalist, and he maintains broad interests in literature and art, in film and media studies, and in politics. His current enthusiasms include works by Samuel Prout, Elizabeth Bishop, and Raul Ruiz. On a more conceptual level, he is preoccupied by the artistic evocation of place, especially as it intersects with the shaping of collective and individual subjectivity; by ethical theory, especially in relation to politics and gender and sexuality; and by problems in the aesthetics and sociology of representation.

James E. Brunson III  

Northern Illinois University

jbrunson@niu.edu

James Edward Brunson III is an art historian who specializes in American modernism. Brunson received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Northern Illinois University, and Ph.D from the University of Chicago. Scholarly interests include race and gender in nineteenth century America. His work has been published in Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game (edited by John Thorn), NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, and Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal. Recently, McFarland Press published his book, The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press, 1871-1890. Brunson’s follow-up work is tentatively titled: The Last Colored Base Ball Book (a title obviously inspired by The Last Dinosaur Book). A practicing artist who specializes in watercolor painting (Brunson painted his book cover), he teaches Hip Hop and Visual Culture at Northern Illinois University.

Anna Brzyski joined the faculty of the Art Department at the University of Kentucky in 2003. She teaches courses in the 18th and 19th century European art, as well as theory, methodology, and criticism. She has taught courses on a broad range of topics, including visual culture, aesthetics, 19th century art, classicism, postmodernism, contemporary art, abstraction, and landscape. Her research interests focus broadly on how value and legitimacy have been negotiated within particular artworlds and across artword meshworks and how particular paradigms of knowledge emerge and why they are maintained. Her dissertation (“Modern Art and Nationalism in Fin de Siècle Poland”) and the majority of her publications have dealt so far with Central/Eastern Europe and in particular Poland during the late 19th and early 20th century. Her work has appeared in Art Criticism, Centropa, 19th Century Art Worldwide, an anthology Art and National Identity at the Turn of the Century, edited by Michelle Facos and Sharon Hirsh (Cambridge 2003), and an anthology Local Strategies - International Ambitions. Modern Art and Central Europe, 1918-1968, edited by Vojtech Lehoda (Czech Academy of Sciences, forthcoming in 2005). She co-edited with Peter Chametzky a special issue of Centropa< (September 2001) entitled “Modernism and Nationalism, Postmodernism and Postnationalism?” and is currently working on two book projects, an anthology Partisan Canons (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Art in the Age of Art History. Modernism, Nationalism and Legitimacy in 19th Century Europe.
Prof. Brzyski is also the project director and compiler of the Polish Art Archive, a digital database of primary source materials pertaining to Polish art, a project funded by Southern Illinois University and the US Department of Educations. She is also the designer and the site manager of the HGCEA website (Historians of German & Central European Art & Architecture). She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the ArtWorlds Press.
 

Valeria Cammarata 

Fellow

University of Palermo

Department of Cultural Studies

Viale delle Scienze, ed. 15

90128 - Palermo, Italy

vcammarata@unipa.it

Valeria Cammarata is fellow of Comparative Literature at the University of Palermo. She received both her MA in Visual Culture and her Phd in Cultural Studies at the University of Palermo. Her dissertation was about the "Archaeology of Feminine Gaze", focusing on women writing about science and literature between seventeenth and eighteenth century. Her main research field his the relationship between image and literature in European Literature (Italo Calvino, George Perec, Laurence Sterne, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood).

Kris Cohen

Assistant Professor

Art History and Humanities

Reed College

krcohen@reed.edu

Kris Cohen studies intimacy and belonging in mediated environments such as the Web, publics, and works of art. He has written on web-based photography, conceptual art and copyright law, blogs, and the challenges to theory and criticism posed by writing in medias res. His dissertation sets out to conceptualize the changing politics and aesthetics of encounter by considering scenes of laughter, protest and searching in ordinary life and in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sharon Hayes, and Thomson & Craighead.

 

Benjamin David
 

Associate Professor
Department of Art History

Lewis & Clark

Portland, Oregon

bendavid@lclark.edu

Benjamin David specializes in Italian art from 1300-1600, with an emphasis on Early Renaissance painting. His scholarship and teaching engage the historical and theoretical implications of the practice of narrative in Renaissance art and theories of narrative more generally. He is especially interested in the relationship between art and literature. Other research projects and courses explore the complex nature of the Renaissance engagement with classical antiquity and visualizations of Dante’s Divine Comedy from the fourteenth century to the present day.




 

Rebecca DeRoo 

Assistant Professor

Department of Art History and Archaeology

Washington University in St. Louis

rderoo@artsci.wustl.edu

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~artarch/sections/faculty/deroo.html

Rebecca DeRoo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis. Her book, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, 2006) explains how the protests that shook France in 1968-the largest insurrections in the modern West-triggered a radical reconsideration of artistic practice and exhibition display that has shaped both art and museums up to the present. Her book received the 2008 Laurence Wylie Prize for French cultural studies. Her current book project, Agnes Varda, Feminism, and The New Wave, reveals the influential French filmmaker's complex visual rhetoric and participation in progressive, trans-Atlantic feminist debates. Rebecca DeRoo's grants and awards include a residency at the French National Institute of Art History, a Killam postdoctoral fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship for research in France, an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Washington University Graduate Student Senate, and a Rhoades Foundation Fellowship through which she curated the "Beyond the Photographic Frame" exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tanya Fernando

Assistant Professor

Department of English

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Robert Friedman

FRIEDMAN_ROBERT_D@Lilly.com

Rob Friedman is associate professor at the University of Eli Lilly and Company. He lectures on a variety of subjects, any subject, really. He writes speeches for Lilly's CEO and other top executives aimed at sustaining the pharmaceutical industry and its profits. Rob has also taught workshops on creativity, speechwriting and publications writing to thousands of professional communicators from around the country, written speeches for the CEOs of several Fortune 500 companies, and worked as a speechwriter for Ameritech and the American Medical Association. Some of these organizations are now defunct and Rob is now free on bond. Twelve of Rob's speeches have appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day and he is a published author of fiction and nonfiction. He studied literature at The Ohio State University and the University of Chicago and says he owes his career in pharmaceuticals to the mentoring on the subject by a professor at those schools.

Assistant Professor of Japanese Humanities

Asian Languages & Cultures

University of Michigan
mfukuoka@umich.edu


Maki Fukuoka works on visual culture of 19th century Japan with a particular emphasis on photographic representations and technology. Her dissertation 'Between Seeing and Knowing: Shifting Standards of Accuracy and the Concept of Shashin in Japan, 1830-1872' examines the process of formulating hakubutsu-gaku discourse, a field of study that combines Chinese and Japanese medical practice with theories of imported natural history, and the role of pictorial representations in establishing and validating the 'accuracy' of hakubutsu-gaku epistemology. She is interested in the intricate relationship between 'tradition' and 'modernity' in Japan and the ways in which their conflicting and often confusing relationships are represented or articulated visually. Her publications include 'Contextualising the peep-box in Tokugawa Japan' in Early Popular Visual Culture. 

David Grubbs
 

Assistant Professor of Radio and Sound Art

Conservatory of Music

Brooklyn College, CUNY

2900 Bedford Ave.

Brooklyn, NY 11210

DGrubbs@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Ming Dong Gu
 

Director, Confucius Institute and Professor , LIT/LANG

UT Dallas

mdgu@utdallas.edu

Hannah Higgins

Associate Professor

Department of Art History

The University of Illinois, Chicago

935 West Harrison

Chicago, IL 60607

higgins@uic.edu

Since receiving a doctorate in Art History from the University of Chicago (1994), Hannah Higgins has pursued a career of university teaching, lecturing and writing on Fluxus, Happenings, the avant-garde, aesthetics, Marcel Duchamp and grids. Her first book, Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) was an adaptation of her thesis. In this book Higgins argued for the primary sensations typical of Fluxus objects and performances. The limitations of this cognitive framework for understanding Fluxus culturally stimulated a new research direction that brings together concrete experience, cognition and communication theory. Her second book, The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) traces a history of grids in western culture from the most ancient (the brick)to the most recent (the web) and is dedicated to Tom Mitchell. The relationships between technological innovation and formal innovation reflects a close collaboration with Douglas Kahn (UC Davis) on the close relationship between experimentalism across the arts in the 1960s and the emergence of mainframe computer technologies. The resulting edited anthology, Mainframe Experimentalism, will appear in 2010 with the University of California Press. She is working on a book provisionally titled The Legacy of Black Mountain College: Long Shadow of the Supine Dome, which explores the production of cross-sensory cognitive material in the interdisciplinary and experimental classrooms of American artists during the postwar period.
 

James Hodge

Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of English

Duke University

jh331@duke.edu

James Hodge is postdoctoral associate in the Department of English at Duke University. He received his BA from Oberlin College, his MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His research interests include the history and theory of media from the late nineteenth century to the present, pre-cinema, and literary and cinematic modernism. He contributed to The Agrippa Files: An online archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

 

Matthew Hofer

Associate Professor

Department of English

University of New Mexico

mrh@unm.edu

 

Research Interests: poetry & poetics, modernist literature (American, British, and transatlantic), avant-garde and experimental writing, and political and public sphere theories.
Current and Contracted Publications: book projects with Illinois University Press and the University of Alabama Press; articles in Modernism/Modernity, New German Critique, Contemporary Literature, Paideuma, and American Literary Scholarship; chapters in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, Ezra Pound in Context (Cambridge UP), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry and Poetics, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century American Fiction, The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry, and the Oxford Bibliographies Online Project (Oxford UP); guest editor of the Langston Hughes Review (fall 2010).

Zachary R. Hooker

PhD Candidate

Department of Anthropology

Columbia University

NY, NY 10027

zrh2101@columbia.edu

Zachary Hooker worked with Prof Mitchell on a MA thesis entitled "Photography in the Mode of the Allegorical: Notes on After September 11th: Images from Ground Zero," which examined photographer's Joel Meyerowitz's post-9/11 archival efforts and an exhibit he produced in collaboration with the US Department of State. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in New York. His dissertation and fieldwork will address issues of politics, aesthetics, auteurism, and film-making pedagogy in contemporary South Korean cinema. He also continues to work on photographic representations of 9/11, recently exploring the amateur photography of Mikey Flowers and his collaboration with artist Kevin Clarke.
 

Adam Jolles

Associate Professor and Chair

Department of Art History

Florida State University

220-D Fine Arts Building

Tallahassee, FL 32306-1151

ajolles@fsu.edu

Adam Jolles works on early twentieth-century European visual culture. His current research concerns the avant-garde's experimental forays into curating in France during the interwar period and the concurrent development of a professional curatorial class in Stalinist Russia. He is concurrently examining the production of printed propaganda in the Soviet Union during World War II.

Elizabeth A. Kessler
Assistant Professor

Art & Art History Department

Ursinus College

Elizabeth A. Kessler’s research and teaching focuses on the visual culture of science and its relationship to art. She also teaches Ursinus College’s freshman seminar, the Common Intellectual Experience, and an occasional course on fashion. She earned an M.A. in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Ph.D from the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. Professor Kessler has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum and Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science; Hubble: Imagining Space and Time, a popular book on the Hubble Space Telescope published by National Geographic; and Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science, a forthcoming edited volume on the sublime in art and science. She is now finishing the manuscript of her first book, Astronomy’s Landscapes: Romantic Aesthetics and the Hubble Space Telescope Images.

Darby Lewes   

Professor of English and Gender Studies

Lycoming College
700 College Place

Williamsport, PA 17701

lewes@lycoming.edu

srv2.lycoming.edu/~lewes/

Darby Lewes is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Lycoming College. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1991 and has since published Dream Revisionaries: Women's Utopian Literature 1870-1920 (1995), Nudes From Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes (2000), and three editions of A Portrait of the Student as a Young Wolf: Motivating Undergraduates (2002, 2003, 2007) as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. She has also edited three collections of essays, A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project (2002), Autopoetica: Representations of the Creative Process in Nineteenth-Century British & American Fiction (2006), and Double Vision: 18th and 19th-Century Literary Palimpsests (2008). She has won a number of awards for her scholarship and teaching, and she speaks on student motivation at conferences and university workshops across the United States.

Riccardo Marchi


 

Associate Professor
Art History
University of South Florida
rmarchi@usf.edu

Stephen Paul Miller
 

Professor of English

St. John's University

300 Howard Avenue

Staten Island, NY 10301

millers@stjohns.edu

Stephen Paul Miller is Professor of English at St, John's University in New York City. He is the author of The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance (Duke University Press, 1999). This book "micro-periodizes" the seventies by utilizing the discourses of politics, poetry, and painting around the phenomena of Watergate, John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and Jasper John's mid-seventies crosshatch paintings so as to note the "rippling epistemes" through which the upheavals of the sixties yield to the Reagan eighties by way of the Watergate era. He co-edited, with Terence Diggory, The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (2001), and he co-edited, with Daniel Morris, Secular Jewish Culture, Radical Poetic Practice (2009).

Miller is also the author of a lot of poetry books: The Bee Flies in May (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), Art Is Boring for the Same Reason We Stayed in Vietnam (Domestic Press, 1992), That Man Who Ground Moths into Film (New Observations, 1982), Skinny Eighth Avenue(2005), Being with a Bullet (2007), and Fort Dad (2009).

He also, with Terence Diggory, co-edited The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (the University of Maine in Orono's National Poetry Foundation, 2001), the first collection of essays concerning more than one of the poets of the New York School of Poetry. His plays have been performed at The Kitchen, P.S. 122, the Bowery Poetry Club, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Pyramid Club, the Mudd Club, and 8BC in New York; Intersection and La Mamelle in San Francisco; the University of Vermont in Burlington; and many other venues. His artwork has been exhibited at P.S. 1 in Long Island City, ABC No Rio, the Ben Shawn Gallery of Paterson University, and other galleries. Among the artists with whom he has collaborated are Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Beth Anderson, Jackson MacLow, Robert Ashley, Billy Bergman, Taylor Mead, Linda Francis, Lucio Pozzi, David Shapiro, Kenward Elmslie, Jim Hayes, Kenneth Deifik, Michael Cooper, Naomi Goldberg, Yvonne Jacquette, Marcia Resnick, Pooh Kaye, Bruce Brand, Tom Fink, Noah Miller, Marjorie Welish, and Sandy MacIntosh. In the seventies, Miller edited the Poetry Mailing List, which used mail art to distribute single authors such as John Cage, Kathy Acker, Joel Oppenheimer, Peter Schjeldahl, Rudy Burkhardt, David Shapiro, and many others. Likening poetry readings in Soho on Saturday afternoons to art exhibitions, Miller started the Ear Inn poetry series in 1978. In 1985, Miller conceived and edited The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side, the first "instant" magazine that authors produced on the spot. It has inspired similar magazines throughout the nation.

Miller's work has appeared in Best American Poetry 1994, boundary 2, Talisman, St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, Another Chicago Magazine, Open City, Shofar, New Observations, American Letters & Commentary, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Boog City, Poetry New York, The Columbia Review, Poetry New York, Mudfish, Le Petite Zine, the Bowery Poetry Club website, Scripsi, Proteus, Tamarind, Appearances, The New Journal, Poetry in Performance, The Paterson Review, Controlled Burn, and elsewhere. Miller has received research grants from the NEH, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library Foundation, and the Columbia University Seminars Office. In 1996 and 1997, he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Krakow, Poland, where he was a professor at Jagiellonian University. In addition to teaching at St. John's University and Jagiellonian University, he has taught American literature, cultural studies, and creative writing at Columbia University, New York University. W.J.T. Mitchell has commented about Stephen Paul Miller's poetry: "Somebody once said poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis with the net down. But Stephen Miller's poetry plays a different game in which the relevant phrase is 'nothing but net,' a series of subtle daggers, long bombs, and slam dunks: sly, funny, artful, and unforgettable. Highly recommended for sports fans and deracinated intellectuals who like being reeled into the net of critically smart poetry."

Kristine Nielsen

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

805 West Pennsylvania Avenue

Urbana, IL 61801

kniels@illinois.edu

Kristine Nielsen is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010-12. Her teaching and research interests include European and American modern and contemporary art, the historiography of art history, the history and theory of iconoclasm, and theories of memory. She is currently working on a book project on the visual confrontations in German monument production in the twentieth century. Nielsen is an editorial board member of a new Scandinavian journal on visual culture Ekfrase: Nordisk Tidsskrift for Visuel Kultur.
 

Alison Pearlman

Associate Professor, Art History

Art Department

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

3801 W. Temple Ave.

Pomona, CA 91768

alisonpearlman@yahoo.com
http://www.alisonpearlman.com

To read more about Alison, visit her blog at theeyeindining.blogspot.com

Anthony Raynsford
 

Historian

Anthony Raynsford is an architectural and urban design historian, whose interdisciplinary research interests bridge across cultural, intellectual and art history, particularly of the 20th century. His current book project is entitled, Modernism and the Archaic City: The Pre-Industrial Past in the Imagination of 20th Century Urban Design. Revising standard accounts of modernism's break with the past, he contends that preindustrial urban forms have always been central to the ideals and images of modernist urbanism. The modernist 'discovery' of the archaic city did not, as some authors have suggested, first emerge as a means of softening the edges of earlier functionalism. Rather, his book argues, this figure of the archaic city was instrumental in defining the essence of modernist urbanism from the beginning. Related to this project are a number of works in progress, including a monograph on the writings of urban planner, Kevin Lynch. He has taught previously in the art history departments of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. Publications include, "Swarm of the Metropolis: Passenger Circulation at Grand Central Terminal and the Ideology of the Crowd Aesthetic," (JAE).
 

Rebecca Reynolds

Assistant Professor

Art Department

University of West Georgia

rlreynol@uchicago.edu

http://home.uchicago.edu/~rlreynol/

Rebecca Lee Reynolds works on post-World War II American sculpture, landscape design, and exhibition practices. She recently completed her dissertation, "From Green Cube to Site: Site-Specific Practices at American Sculpture Parks and Gardens, 1965-1987." In 2006-2007 she was a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in the Garden and Landscape Studies program, followed by a summer residency at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, France. Beginning August 2008, she will be an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at the University of West Georgia.
 

John Paul Ricco

Associate Professor

Contemporary Art History, Media Theory, and Criticism
and Coordinator of the
Visual Culture and Communication Program 

University of Toronto at Mississauga
CCT Building, Room 3057
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
Canada

john.ricco@utoronto.ca

utm.utoronto.ca/dvs/faculty/ricco.html
 

Christa Noel Robbins

Visiting Assistant Professor

Department of Art History

University of Illinois, Chicago

christa.robbins@gmail.com

Christa Noel Robbins specializes in twentieth-century modernist art and theory, with an emphasis on postwar modernist painting in the U.S. Her current interests include theories of abstraction and perception, the cultural and political definition of the self in the United States, and the history of American art criticism and theory. She is in the process of completing a book manuscript on late-modernist painting in the United States entitled The Right to Be Let Alone: Privacy and Abstraction in American Painting and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
 

Michael Robbins

Visiting Assistant Professor

Department of English

The University of Southern Mississippi

murkplectrum@gmail.com

Michael Robbins's first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be published by Penguin in spring 2012. His poems and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, London Review of Books, Village Voice, and several other journals. He has completed a dissertation called "Quarrels with Ourselves: Just Realism and Contemporary Poetry."

 

Jeffrey Saletnik 

Visiting Assistant Professor and ACLS Fellow

Department of Art History and the History of Art

Amherst College

107 Fayerweather Hall

Amherst, MA 01002

jsaletnik@gmail.com

Jeffrey Saletnik is visiting assistant professor and ACLS Fellow in the Department of Art and the History of Art. He completed his dissertation "Pedagogy, Modernism, and Medium Specificity: The Bauhaus and John Cage" in the Department of Art History at The University of Chicago. He is also formally trained as a musician. His research explores how Bauhaus-indebted pedagogic methods and practices were expressed in America and how artists working in non-visual media were drawn to Bauhaus ideas; significantly in relationships between the work and teaching of Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and John Cage. He has presented papers at the College Art Association Annual Conference, The Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Tate Modern; published on Eva Hesse and Josef Albers; and co-edited Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism (Routledge, 2009). Recently he was a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies

Raél Jero Salley 

Lecturer

Columbia College

Chicago, IL

salleyr@gmail.com

Raél Jero Salley, Ph.D. is an artist, cultural theorist and art historian. He holds degrees in Fine Art from The Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA), and exhibits his visual work internationally. In 2009, Salley took a Ph.D. from The Committee on the History of Culture at The University of Chicago. His dissertation Unfinished Visuality: Contemporary Art and Black Diaspora 1964-2008 is focused on contemporary art and visual production, and thinks through visual products and practices of Black Diaspora. Salley now publishes essays on contemporary art and visual culture, and is a Lecturer in Art History at Columbia College in Chicago. At present, he is working on a book manuscript about contemporary visual practices in a world of wanderers. Salley works in Chicago, Illinois and Paris, France.

Edward Shanken 

Executive Director

Information Science + Information Studies

Duke University, Box 9400

2204 Erwin Road

Durham, NC 27708-0400

giftwrap@duke.edu

Edward Shanken is Executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) program at Duke University, which supports interdisciplinary collaborations involving creative uses of technology.  He is editor of Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (University of California Press, 2003) and author of Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon Press, 2004). He has lectured internationally on art and technology, including Einstein Meets Magritte (Brussels), ISEA (Rotterdam), Consciousness Reframed (Wales), and SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles). He was Director of Visual Research for Reactive Search, Inc., a software company based in Durham.  Dr. Shanken earned his Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University, his MBA from Yale, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Duke's Center for Teaching and Learning, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Levi Smith

Instructor

Department of Visual and Critical Studies

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
37 South Wabash, 10th Floor
Chicago, IL 60603-3103
 

Levi Smith, (b.1952) studied studio art at Phillips Academy, Andover and at the University of Vermont. An art historian by profession (M.A. and Ph.D., The University of Chicago) he has continued to pursue his painting, beginning to exhibit frequently in 1999.
His works range from compositions done in front of the subject, to more abstract compositions created in the studio from remembered experience. He works in a variety of media including paintings in oil, watercolor or acrylic, and drawings in charcoal, graphite or ink.

Margaret Soltan

Associate Professor

Department of English

George Washington University

Washington DC 20052

margaret.soltan@gmail.com

Margaret Soltan's journal articles, journalism pieces, and contributions to books have included work on Don DeLillo, Malcolm Lowry, James Merrill, postmodern architecture and interior design, film, intellectuals, responses to September 11, and, most recently, poetry (her essay, "Hoax Poetry in America," in the journal Angelaki, produced a lengthy response and exchange).  She is the author of Teaching Beauty and University Diaries (one of the highest-profile academic blogs on the web.) She also blogs at Inside Higher Education. And click here to see her interview on the News Hour and BBC.

Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis 

Professor

Department of Afro-American Studies

University of Wisconsin-Madison

4121 White Hall, Helen C

600 N Park St

Madison, WI 53706

As an artist, art historian, and professor, Freida Tesfagiorgis engages art historical facts and attendant theories, and produces visual forms that have changed in styles, themes, and media since the early seventies.  She began her undergraduate study of art at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, then finished at Northern Illinois University where she earned a B.S. in Art Education.  She studied painting and printmaking at the graduate level at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A., M.F.A.).  The institutions of her work in art history include Indiana University, Bloomington (African Art in the CIC program) as part of her M.F.A program, and the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago (Primitivism and Modern Art; Visual Culture and Critical Race Theory).  She has curated numerous exhibitions in her area and published essays in exhibition catalogues, periodicals and encyclopedias; e.g. Faith Ringgold: Twenty Year Retrospective; Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women; Women Studies Encyclopedia: Literature, Arts, and Learning.  She is currently curating an exhibition of contemporary African art for the Elvehjem Museum.  Her own work has been documented in The International Review of African American Art, Cross Cultures, and many other exhibition catalogues.  She has exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI), Fine Arts Museum of the South (AL), Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), National Gallery (Dakar, Senegal), Museo Arte Contemporanea di Gibellina (Palermo, Italy), and others.  She sees an inextricable relationship between writing about art and producing art.  In addition, she has developed a web site to help facilitate the study of a wealth of visual forms by artists of the African Diaspora.  Through it, she proposes to share her creative and scholarly interests, provide an educational service to those interested in this relatively new area of Art History, and make available a slide resource for the students enrolled in her courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Daniel Tiffany

Professor

Department of English,

Department of Comparative Literature

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089

tiffany@usc.edu
 

Daniel Tiffany is the author of Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard 1995) and Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (California 2000), named by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of "the Best Books of 2000."  Professor Tiffany is also a poet and translator of works from French, Greek, and Italian, and his writings have been published in numerous journals and magazines.

Orrin Wang

Professor

Department of English,

Comparative Literature Program

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20742

ow5@umail.umd.edu

Orrin Wang specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge. How that convergence speaks to the question of modernity is the focus of his first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). How that convergence is further expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of sensation and sobriety is the subject of his latest work, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). Wang has written on such figures as P.B. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Derrida, and Zizek and also teaches and studies the gothic. He is also the Series Editor of the award winning Romantic Circles Praxis Series.

Visit the site at:http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ For a Romantic Circles Praxis Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, visit: http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/mitchell/index.html.  >

Tina Yarborough   

Professor

Department of Art History,

Interdisciplinary Studies

Georgia College and State University

Milledgeville, GA 31061

tyarborough@gcsu.edu

Homepage: http://fdsa.gcsu.edu:6060/tyarborough/

Paul Young

Associate Professor, director of Film Studies

Department of English

Vanderbilt University

paul.d.young@vanderbilt.edu

Paul Paul Young first saw H. R. Pufnstuf: The Movie in an unairconditioned theater in March of 1975, and realized a few moments after being seated that the film merely anthologized old episodes of the TV series. This is probably when he decided to make his living either producing films or complaining about them. Forgetting this lesson and finding reason to believe he would require training in a remunerative profession, Young discovered, to his chagrin, that architecture students were expected to design buildings that refuse to collapse. Young consequently received his BA in English at the University of Iowa in 1990. At Iowa, Dudley Andrew's tutelage in European film history made clear to him that, had Francois Truffaut had to sit through H. R. Pufnstuf: The Movie as a child, he would likely have figured that the French cinéma de qualité was just dandy by comparison and might never have launched the French New Wave. While today Young produces no films, nor does he find nearly so much to complain about as one might expect considering the success of the Transformers series, he believes that critical analysis and historical research provide a pleasing middle ground.

Rebecca Zorach

Associate Professor

Department of Art History

University of Chicago

Chicago, IL 60637

rezorach@uchicago.edu
Homepage:http://home.uchicago.edu/~rezorach

Rebecca Zorach works on sixteenth-century French and Italian art and contemporary art and theory, especially theory of gender and sexuality.  She has published articles in Art History, Res, and Wired; she recently completed a book manuscript on abundance in the visual culture of Sixteenth-Century France, and has projects in the works on Renaissance prints and contemporary collaborative art.

Eduardo de Almeida

Ph.D. Student

Department of English

University of Chicago

dealmeid@uchicago.edu

Eduardo de Almeida is a Ph.D. student in the Department of English. His research interests include early American literary and cultural production, media theory, Asian American literature, and critical theory. His dissertation attends to the poetics of repetition and form in examining the ways in which contingency and contagion are mutually inflected in Asian American literature. Currently, Eduardo's research is focused on exploring the relationships between modalities of colonizing imperatives in 18th- and 19th-Century transatlantic print and visual culture. One final thing: there sits, atop the list of texts he hopes never to encounter, the following title: "eXistenDing Digits: Transcoding the Anaesthetics of Puppetry."



 

David Alworth

Doctoral Candidate

Department of English

University of Chicago

dja1@uchicago.edu

David J. Alworth is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature. His dissertation-"The Site of the Social: Supermarkets, Landfills, Roads, and Ruins"-conceptualizes the social as an association of humans and nonhumans by examining site-specific literary and visual art in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. His areas of specialization include twentieth-century literary and visual art, post-World War II U. S. cultural and intellectual history, social theory, media studies, and the multidisciplinary research field known as the "cultures and histories of the human sciences." With support from the Social Science Research Council, he has completed archival and ethnographic fieldwork in Malta and in Germany. His recent work appears in a special issue of New Literary History devoted to "New Sociologies of Literature" (www.newliteraryhistory.org).