Teaching with Primary Sources Workshop

Funded by the Dedalus Foundation

Cohort 1

Francesca Balboni (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently completing a dissertation on Marie Menken’s experimental films that elaborates and historicizes Menken's fundamentally generous approach to filmmaking--an approach that challenges the auteur-emphasis and romantic individualism of American experimental film, then and as it continues to be studied today. Balboni's writing on film, photography, and beyond has been published in Oxford Art Journal, spot magazine, and caa.reviews.

Sarah Cunningham is an associate clinical professor of art at Pace University where she is also the founding director of the Pace University Art Gallery. She is a contemporary art curator with over twenty-five years of experience developing art exhibitions, public events, and educational programs. Her career is unified by the conviction that art is an essential part of society that creates dialogue and exposes us to new ideas. She has curated over fifty contemporary art exhibitions with rich curricular connections including rafa esparza: for you and the sky, Devon Tsuno: Urban Reclamation, Inherited Traits: Nina Katchadourian & Heidi Kumao, Simonette Quamina: The Night Gardener, Ceaphas Stubbs: SO CLOSE, and The Chinatown Art Brigade: Degentrification Archives. She previously served as the director of Santa Barbara City College Atkinson Gallery, director of the College of New Jersey Art Gallery, curator of exhibitions and public programs at the Alice Austen House Museum, and executive director of the Albany Center Galleries. To complement her curatorial work, she is also now a contributing writer for LUM Art Magazine. She received her BA in American Studies from Tufts University and her MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University.

Megan Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Richmond, specializing in postwar photographic and time-based media and discourses on race in the African diaspora. Recent publications and reviews can be found in the forthcoming Routledge volume on African diasporic art history, Art Journal, and the Woman’s Art Journal, and she was guest scholarly editor for the winter 2022 issue of Media-N, “No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race.”

Adrian R. Duran is a Professor of Art History in the School of the Arts at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO) where he teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism. He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Delaware in 2008. Duran’s research is focused on Italian Modernism, particularly between the fall of Fascism and the anni di piombo. His book Painting Politics and the New Front of Art in Postwar Italy was published by Ashgate in 2014 and reprinted by Routledge in 2018 and he has published on Afro Basaldella, Leoncillo Leonardi, the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde and questions of influence and internationalism in Italian art of the 1940s and 50s. Recently, Duran has begun work on Chicanx/Latinx Art and is the Chair of his university’s ArteLatinx biennial. He is also involved in developing curriculum and programming for UNO’s Medical Humanities and Human Rights faculties and Office of Latino/Latin American Studies. 

Miriam Grotte-Jacobs received her PhD in art history from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where she specialized in postwar American art. Her research explores the intersection of race and gender with representation and abstraction in the art world of mid-century Washington, DC, focusing primarily on artists associated with the so-called Washington Color School and the interconnected social, political, and institutional histories of the nation’s capital. She currently works as a program specialist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She previously held positions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and D’Amelio Terras Gallery in New York. 

Elizabeth Hamilton, is an assistant professor at Fort Valley State University and art historian whose research focuses on visual culture of the African diaspora, feminism, and Afrofuturism. Her first book is Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art (Routledge), which is the winner of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. Dr. Hamilton has published research in Nka: The Journal of Contemporary African Art, African Arts, the International Review of African American Art, Harper's Bazaar, Smithsonian Voices, CAA Reviews, and SmartHistory. She received the National Women’s Study Association: Women of Color Caucus Essay Award for “Abandoning the Negress and Recovering Laure in Manet’s Olympia.” She curated an exhibition, A Different Mirror: (re)Imagining Black Womanhood at the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia. Dr. Hamilton participated in the Art Writing Workshop, which is a partnership between the International Art Critics Association/USA Section (AICA/USA) and The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She completed her master’s and doctorate at the University of Florida’s School of Art and Art History, where she was a McKnight Doctoral Fellow. Before that, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wyoming. 

Craig Houser teaches at the City College of New York, which is one of many schools that comprise the City University of New York and caters to a diverse student body. Working closely with his colleagues, Houser serves as the program director for the MA in Art History and its Art Museum Studies concentration and co-chairs the Curriculum Committee for the Art Department. Houser’s courses focus primarily on modern and contemporary art and museum studies, as well as research methods. Previously, Houser taught at Parsons School of Design and worked as a curator and educator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Houser has published in a number of academic publications including the Journal of Curatorial Studies, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and Art Journal. In 2021, Houser completed the workshop Teaching with Primary Sources at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.  

Joanne Kesten, Columbus College of Art and Design

Kelsey Malone is the Curator of the Doris Ulmann Galleries and Berea College Art Collection at Berea College in Kentucky where she oversees the College’s collection of over 16,000 artworks and teaches courses in museum studies and art history. She is a specialist in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art, with a particular focus on American women photographers, sculptors, and illustrators. Malone’s research examines the wide variety of ways that women artists engaged in collaborative strategies – by forming their own professional organizations, mentoring one another, and sharing studios, living spaces, and commissions – to achieve success in a profession that had historically been closed to them. Most recently, her writing has addressed art historical pedagogical strategies engaging with the archive, museum spaces, and inclusivity in the discipline, work that has been supported through participation in workshops organized by the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, the Council of Independent Colleges, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Linda Merrill, Teaching Professor in Art History, Emory University, was curator of American art at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, until 1998, when she became the first Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Dr. Merrill has published several books on Whistler and his contemporaries, including A Pot of Paint: Aestheticism on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (1993), An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art (1990), and The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (1998). She organized the exhibition After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting for the High Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2003; she is currently organizing an exhibition for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory titled Recasting Antiquity: Whistler, Tanagra, & the Female Form. Dr. Merrill received her BA in English from Smith College and her PhD in the History of Art from the University of London, where she studied on a Marshall Scholarship.

Michaela Rife is an assistant professor of art history at SUNY Plattsburgh specializing in modern and contemporary art with a focus on North America and the environment. She is currently working on her first book about New Deal-era murals in the Dust Bowl region as a way to understand how art contends with environmental disaster while supporting (or resisting) settler colonialism. Her writing has appeared in the Archives of American Art Journal, Panorama, and Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities. Her research has been supported by institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Antiquarian Society, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Getty Research Institute. Before coming to SUNY Plattsburgh in 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and History of Art at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2020.

Helena Vilalta, Central Saint Martins, University College London

Peter Wang is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky, specializing in modern/contemporary art, American art, and the history of photography. Wang holds a PhD in Art History from Tyler School of Art, Temple University with a dissertation entitled The Profane and Profound: American Road Photography from 1930 to the Present. His primary research examines the enduring marriage between photography and the American road trip, contextualizing automobility and artists as motorists through themes of automobiles, highways, and the roadside, including photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore, among others. He is currently working on a book manuscript and a series of journal articles to reframe this genre study, while developing his next research project on Asian American art and visual culture. His research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA), the Dedalus Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Cohort 2

Jessica D. Brier is a curator and historian of art and design with a focus on modernism and the intermediality of photography, print, architecture, and graphics. She currently serves as Curator of Photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, where she is co-organizing the exhibition Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna (2024) and organized On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print (2022), both accompanied by fully illustrated catalogs. She is currently working on the manuscript for her book, Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography Between the World Wars. She previously served as curatorial assistant in Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where she contributed to exhibitions including Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa (2014); South Africa in Apartheid and After: David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, Billy Monk (2012–13); and Francesca Woodman (2011–12). Her research has been supported by the American Council on Germany, Design History Society, Central European History Society, German Historical Institute, and DesignInquiry. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Southern California and an MA in curatorial practice from the California College of the Arts.

Ian T. Carey received his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from Illinois State University. He also earned a BAS in Anthropology and Political Science from the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. Ian has taught painting, drawing, and Museum Studies courses at Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, and California State Polytechnic Humboldt. He has served as the Merwin and Wakeley Galleries director at Illinois Wesleyan University. Ian is a working artist who focuses on the anxieties and difficulties experienced within the American Working class. Ian is currently the Permanent Art Collection Curator at Indiana State University, teaching Political Philosophy and Museum Studies coursework. His underlying teaching philosophy attempts to integrate primary resources and the collections he manages into unique learning experiences highlighting the complexity of Art History and how it informs our understanding of our everyday lives.

Rex Cassidy, instructor, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Erina Duganne is Professor of Art History at Texas State University, where she teaches courses ranging from the history of photography to Latinx art history. Her research and writing interests address three interrelated areas: artist activism and solidarity practices; documentary photography and its histories; and race and its representation. She is author of The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010), co-author of Global Photography: A Critical History (2020), and co-editor of Cold War Camera (2023). Her curatorial projects include Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (with Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, 2006), Northern Triangle (with Borderland Collective, 2014), and Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities (with Abigail Satinsky, 2021). She also serves as an editor for the journal Photography & Culture and for the book series Feminist Art Histories. Currently, she is finishing a book manuscript on the short-lived solidarity practices of the 1984 activist campaign, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. This project is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Odette England is an Anglo-Australian writer and artist who uses photography, printmaking, archives, xerography, and collage in her work. England is a 2022 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. Other recent honors include a Rhode Island Council Arts Fellowship and grants from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund, and Anonymous Was a Woman. In 2023, England is a PhotoAccess Artist Fellow in Canberra, Australia, an EKARD artist-in-residence at Bucknell University, and a visiting artist for the Long-Term Photobook Program at the Penumbra Foundation. She was named a finalist for the 2023 Foam Paul Huf Award and, most recently, the winner of the 2023 Tall Poppy Press Publishing Award and a recipient of a 2023 Polycopies Publishing Grant. She has published three award-winning books, including Dairy Character, recipient of the 2021 Light Work Book Award. Her fourth book, Woman Wearing Ring Shields Face from Flash, will be published in October by Skinnerboox. England received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a PhD from the Australian National University. She is a visiting lecturer at Brown University.

Emily Everhart, assistant professor of art history, Art Academy of Cincinnati

Ellen Handy, associate professor and curator, City College of New York, CUNY

Sharrissa Iqbal, assistant adjunct professor, University of California, Irvine

Emily Kathryn Morgan is Associate Professor of Art History at Iowa State University. She received her PhD in History and Theory of Art from the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the history of photography, addressing how photographic meaning shifts as images are circulated and redistributed by various means including publication and appropriation. Previous research projects have focused on the appropriation of pornographic imagery in American modernist photography; and on photographically-illustrated accounts of poverty and street culture in nineteenth-century Britain. Her current research project considers the visual cultures of industrial-scale animal slaughter and meat production in the United States. Dr. Morgan is the author of Street Life in London: Context and Commentary (MuseumsEtc. 2014), and she has published articles in Art Journal, History of Photography, and Food and History, among others. Her book Imaging Animal Industry: American Meatpacking in Photography and Visual Culture is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.

Erin Pauwels, assistant professor of art history, Temple University

Nathan Rees is associate professor of art history at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton. He holds a PhD in the history of American art from the University of Maryland. His research explores the intersection of race and religion in the art and visual culture of the United States—his publications and presentations have reconsidered monuments to Western colonizers, addressed Modernist appropriations of Indigenous America, and offered ecocritical approaches to the study of landscape painting. His book, Mormon Visual Culture and the American West (Routledge, 2021), situates the visual culture of Mormonism in the social contexts of nineteenth-century Utah Territory.  

Gretchen Sinnett, associate professor of art history, Salem State University

Organized by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; the Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby College; and the Cleveland Museum of Art

Katie Anania specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with an emphasis on temporary and “minor” works like drawings, letters, tents, mobile clinics, packaging, and food. Her current book project, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America, examines the shifting position of drawing in American studio practice in the long 1960s. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Assistant Professor Sarah Archino specializes in early twentieth-century American art, with a particular focus on New York. Her scholarship weaves together the avant-garde circles around Robert Henri, Alfred Stieglitz, and Walter Arensberg with a particular interest in the emergence of Dadaism in New York. Current projects also include research on the instruction of visual literacy with undergraduates and instructional partnerships with Clemson’s School of Nursing and the Family Medicine Residency Program at Prisma Health. She arrived at Furman University following two years of service as the Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in American Art at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art in Paris and one year as a research fellow with the Duchamp Research Center in Schwerin, Germany. She is also a founder and co-editor of the AndOr Project, an online art space that explores the practices and implications of digitality for exhibition and archive research.

Melody Barnett Deusner is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana University. In researching and teaching the visual and material culture of the late nineteenth century, she focuses primarily on patronage relationships, institutional formations, and the afterlives of objects. Her first book, A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons in Britain and America (forthcoming 2020), explores intersections between art making, social networking, and systems management in the transatlantic sphere.

Melanee C. Harvey is assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art at Howard University. She earned a BA from Spelman College and went on to Boston University where she received her MA and PhD in American Art and Architectural History. She has published extensively on Black Arts Movement artists including Faith Ringgold, James Phillips and African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA). She is currently working on her book project entitled, Patterns of Permanence: African Methodist Episcopal Architecture and Visual Culture. The project traces the aesthetic discourse among the African Methodist Episcopal denomination from the late-eighteenth century to the early-twentieth centuries.   

Tess Korobkin specializes in the art and visual culture of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her interests include histories of sculpture and photography, the politics of materiality and intermediality, public monuments, critical race art history, and the visual culture of race and violence in American modernism. Korobkin’s current book project, Sculptural Bodies of the Great Depression, reveals how American artists in the 1930s reinvented the form and politics of sculpture’s public life in response to the era’s societal turbulence, emergent modernisms, and the rise of documentary photography. In 2018, Korobkin received her PhD from Yale University. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Luce Foundation/ACLS, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Lunder Institute for American Art, and the Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  

Austin Porter is Assistant Professor of Art History and American Studies at Kenyon College, where he teaches courses on American art and visual culture. His research examines government art patronage during the New Deal and World War II. He has held fellowships with Kenyon’s Center for the Study of American Democracy, SAAM, ACLS, and the Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation. Austin has taught classes at Boston University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Boston, and the Kansas City Art Institute. He is currently co-editing a volume of essays on the early history of the Museum of Modern Art, and has published book reviews for Art Bulletin, Panorama, The Journal of Military History, and caareviews. In the spring of 2019, he received Kenyon’s award for Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence.

Annie Ronan is an assistant professor of art history in The School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech, where she offers courses on modern and contemporary art. A specialist in American art and visual culture, she earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2015. Animal studies, eco-criticism, and the history of science inspire her research, which, to date, has largely focused on the representation of creaturely life during the long nineteenth century. Her current book project investigates the racial politics of animal art from the Reconstruction era.

Emma R. Silverman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of American art at Smith College. Her research examines the intersections of art, geography, and community through critical theories of race and gender. Silverman is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the ways that the Watts Towers, a backyard structure built by an Italian American immigrant, was mobilized by artists in Los Angeles. She is also interested in public scholarship, in particular the ways that oral histories and digital mapping projects can support the conservation of endangered sites. Silverman received her PhD in art history from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She has held fellowships from the Mellon Public Scholars program, the Luce Foundation/ACLS, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts.

Allison M. Stagg is an art historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century American art, with a focus on print culture and visual humor. She received her undergraduate degree from Mary Washington College, Virginia and her MA and PhD in Art History from University College London. Stagg has been awarded fellowships from the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. In 2016, she was appointed the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin. She has also taught courses at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz and at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Stagg’s research has been published in Print Quarterly, Visual Culture in Britain, and The Journal for Art Market Studies. She is presently acting as curator at the Mark Twain Center for Transatlantic Relations, Kurpfälzisches Museum, where she is organizing the exhibition Mark Twain in Heidelberg.

Bernida Webb-Binder received her PhD in the History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University. She is Assistant Professor of Art History & Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. Her research area is Pacific art and blackness in the United States and Oceania. Her dissertation, Affinities and Affiliations: Black Pacific Art in the United States and New Zealand, 1948–2008, was supported by a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. In it, she compares visual representations of the female body of color of and by Pacific and African American women to uncover shared perspectives on identity, genealogy, diaspora, and indigeneity. Her broader interests are photographic portraiture, body adornment and performance, and narrative and identity.