Postdoc Opportunities

Posted on August 29, 2019

Terra Fellowship

Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellowship for American Art, Université Paris Nanterre and Université Paris-Diderot, 2018–20

Endowed by a generous grant of the Terra Foundation for American Art , this two-year research and teaching fellowship in Paris offers a postdoctoral scholar the opportunity to pursue his or her own work, and teach (in English) at the universities of Paris-Nanterre and Paris-Diderot for 24 months. The fellow will receive a $42,000 annual stipend (to cover all costs including travel, housing, visa, health insurance, research, and so on ; to be disbursed in euros). The program also includes a $2,000 annual fund towards the organization of scientific events.

For the period 2018–20, the recipient of the fellowship is Dr. Tatsiana Zhurauliova, Ph.D. graduate in History of Art from Yale University (“Arcadia Americana : Landscape in American Art during World War II,” 2014), who comes to us from the University of Chicago, where she has been a fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, and Collegiate Assistant Professor. The partner universities Paris Diderot and Paris Nanterre, and research groupes LARCA and HAR, are happy, honored, and excited to welcome Dr. Zhurauliova.

During her stay, Dr. Zhurauliova will work to complete her book project, provisionally entitled After Landscape : American Art and Spatial Imagination, 1941-1945. The goal of this project is to reflect on the history of U.S. internationalism, while also developing a conceptual framework for thinking about spatial representation in twentieth-century American art. Her second project will focus on the multi-lingual and multi-national networks of Soviet-American artistic exchanges in the 1920s and the early 1930s. The LARCA community will support these projects and offer venues for presentation and discussion

As per the terms of the grant, Dr. Zhurauliova will teach (in English) a Fall seminar in American art history and visual culture to graduate students in art history (Paris Nanterre) and American visual and cultural history (Paris Diderot).

For 2018-2019, the theme of the seminar will be Embodied Landscapes : Nature, Self, and Society in American Art. This course examines how artists engaged with the notions of place, space, and landscape in American visual culture from the 1830s to the 1970s. From Thomas Cole’s monumental series The Course of Empire (1833-36) to the twentieth-century narratives of the end of landscape, this course explores the relationship between spatial representation and the histories of imperialism, nationalism, and globalism.

For 2019-2020, the theme of the seminar will be The Self Imagined: Portraiture, Identity, and Difference in American Art. This course focuses on portraiture and images of the body in American art from the 1880s to the 1980s. It examines changes in the concept of selfhood in the U.S., while also exploring the ways in which various artistic practices have informed and altered perceptions and definitions of such identity categories as gender, race, and nationality. Paying close attention to individual works of art, the course analyses their role in the production, reproduction, and transformation of social practices, practices that are themselves contingent on the notions of belonging and difference.  

The Self Imagined: Portraiture, Identity, and Difference in American Art

Fridays, 10:00-12:00
Terra Foundation for American Art Center, Conference Room
121 rue de Lille, 75007 Paris

Instructor: Tatsiana Zhurauliova

Course Description

This course will focus on portraiture and images of the body in American art from the 1880s to the 1980s. We will examine changes in the concept of selfhood in the U.S., while also reflecting on the ways in which various artistic practices have informed and altered perceptions and definitions of such identity categories as gender, race, and nationality. Looking closely at individual works of art, we will discuss their role in the production, reproduction, and transformation of social practices, practices that are themselves contingent on the notions of belonging and difference.

Evaluation

  • Attendance and participation in class discussions: 20%
  • Question for the class discussion based on a select required reading, 3 questions total for the semester, 15%:
    *Each student is asked to email the instructor a question that critically engages with a select required reading and that can provide basis for the class discussion that week. Each student is required to send no less than three questions over the course of the semester with each individual question focused on a separate reading. It is up to each student to choose weeks/readings for which they want to pose a question. Each question should be sent by email no later than 20:00 on Thursday, the day before the class meeting that week.
  • Oral presentation of an assigned topic, 2-3 students presenting each class: 20%
    *The presentation should be about 10 minutes and should include an analytical overview of a given text, its central argument and methodological approach. Students are expected to prepare a PowerPoint to accompany their presentation and to email it to the instructor in advance (the PowerPoint should be limited to 3-5 slides).
  • Short essay on an individual work of art (600-900 words), due November 8: 15%
  • Research paper (1500-2000 words), due at the end of semester: 30%

Readings: All books mentioned below are available at the Terra Library on reserve. Unless noted otherwise, all articles are available from Jstor and are downloadable at the Terra Library from a library computer.

Course Schedule

September 20: Introduction I: Case Study (Nanterre students)

September 27: Introduction II: Identity and Representation (Nanterre and Diderot students)

October 4: The Subject vs. Representation

Required Reading: Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X,” American Art 15: 3 (2001): 8-33—PDF available on Jstor

October 11: Framing Citizenship

Required Reading: Martin A. Berger, “Genre Painting and the Foundations of Modern Race,” in Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, pp. 11-42.

*Presentation 1: Anna Pegler-Gordon, “Introduction,” in In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, pp. 1-21.

*Presentation 2: Xiaojing Zhou, “Spatial Construction of the ‘Enemy Race’: Miné Okubo’s Visual Strategies in Citizen 13660,” MELUS 32, no. 3 (2007): 51-73—PDF available on Jstor

*Presentation 3: Tanya Sheehan, “Writing the Self through Others: Racial Humor and the Photographic Postcard,” in Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor, University Park: The Pennsylvannia State University Press, 2018, pp. 102-131.

October 18: Gender Trouble

Required Reading: David M. Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood in the Art of Thomas Eakins,” in Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, eds., Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 133-166.

*Presentation 1: Martin A. Berger, “Alternative Communities,” in Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 47-84.

*Presentation 2: Asma Naeem, “Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewing’s A Reading,
Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph,” American Quarterly 63 (September 2011): 462-485—PDF available on Jstor

*Presentation 3: Erin Pauwels, “‘Let Me Take Your Head’: Photographic Portraiture and the Gilded Age Celebrity Image,” in Wendy Wick Reaves, ed. Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture, Washington, D.C., London: National Portrait Gallery, 2018, pp. 136–155.

October 25: Medium and Difference

Required Reading: Tirza True Latimer, “Introduction: ‘Eccentric Propositions,’” in Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017, pp. 1-14.

*Presentation 1: Harriet Riches, “’Picture Taking and Picture Making’: Gender Difference and the Historiography of Photography,” in Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography, History, Difference, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015, pp. 128-150.

*Presentation 2: Selection from Mark Godfrey, “Notes on Black Abstraction,” in Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, eds., Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, London: Tate Publishing, 2017, pp. 165-191.

*Presentation 3: James Boaden, “Moving Houses: Jess and Robert Duncan’s Queer Domesticity,” Oxford Art Journal 36.2 (2013): 257–280
—PDF available on Jstor

November 1: Autumn Break

November 8: Visit to Jeu de Paume

*Paper 1 due

November 15: The Self as Surface

Required Reading: David Joselit, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness,” Art History 23: 1 (March 2000): 19-34—PDF provided by the instructor

*Presentation 1: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick “Queer Performativity: Warhol’s Shyness/Warhol’s Whiteness,” in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and Jose Esteban Munoz, eds., Pop Out: Queer Warhol, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, pp. 134-43.

*Presentation 2: Mike Kelley, “Death and Transfiguration [on Paul Thek]” (1992) in Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 138-148.

*Presentation 3: Paul Schimmel, “Autobiographie et autoportrait dans les Combines de Rauschenberg” in Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2006, pp. 210-228.

November 22: Self-Determination and the Politics of Representation

Required Reading: Richard J. Powell, “Introduction: Posing While Black,” in Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 1-21.

*Presentation 1: Kellie Jones, “Emerge,” in South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 23-66.

*Presentation 2: Philip Brookman, “Looking for Alternatives: Notes on Chicano Art, 1960-1990,” and Malaquias Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-Montoya, “A Critical Perspective on the State of Chicano Art,” in Jennifer A. Gonzalez, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Terezita Romo, eds., Chicano and Chicana art: A Critical Anthology, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 19-29 and 37-44.

*Presentation 3: Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Mark Rifkin, and Bethany Schneider, “Introduction: Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity,” GLQ Special Issue 16: 1-2 (2010): 5-34—PDF provided by the instructor

November 29: The Individual and the Social

Required Reading: Nizan Shaked, “The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism as Political Art,” in The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 113-150.

*Presentation 1: Adrian Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” in Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, London; New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 239–246.

*Presentation 2: Gil Pasternak, “Intimate Conflicts: Foregrounding the Radical Politics of Family Photographs,” in Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography, History, Difference, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015, pp. 217-236.

 *Presentation 3: Erina Duganne, “Roy DeCarava, Harlem, and the Psychic Self,” in The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography, Hanover: Darthmouth College Press: University Press of New England, 2010, pp. 132-167.

December 6: Confronting the Audience

Required Reading: Darby English, “Introduction,” in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 1-26.

*Presentation 1: Kobena Mercer, “Review: Looking for Trouble,” Transition 51 (1991): 184-197—PDF provided by the instructor

*Presentation 2: Huey Copeland, “‘Bye, Bye Black Girl’: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat,” Art Journal 64: 2 (Summer 2005): 62-77—PDF available on Jstor

 *Presentation 3: Nicole R. Fleetwood, “‘One Shot’: Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris and the Photographic Practice of Non-Iconicity,” in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, pp. 33-70.

December 13: Absent Bodies, Invisible Histories

Required Reading: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Negative-Positive Truths,” in Representations 113: 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 16-38—PDF available on Jstor

*Presentation 1: Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies,” in Representations 113: 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 39-71—PDF available on Jstor

*Presentation 2: Richard J. Powell, “Herein Lie Buried Many Things,” in African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2012, 13-33.

*Presentation 3: Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21: 2–3 (2015): 183-207—PDF provided by the instructor

December 20: Perspectives on Postidentity (optional for Nanterre students)

Required Reading: Mark Watson, “Jimmie Durham’s Building a Nation: Across Post-Indian, Post-American Modernities,” American Art 28:1 (Spring 2014): 16-24—PDF available on Jstor

 

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