DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Hannah Feldman is not accepting graduate students for the academic year 2024-2025.

Hannah Feldman is Associate Professor of Art History and core faculty in Middle Eastern and North African Studies as well as Comparative Literary Studies. Her research, teaching, and advising center on late modern and contemporary art and visual culture. Her first book, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France (Duke, 2014), has been reviewed in over ten national and international publications, including Art Journal, Art Bulletin, and The American Historical Review. The book revises accounts of mid-century French aesthetics to argue for the centrality of decolonization to the contemporaneous theorization of urban space, photography, the public, spectacle, and the very project of writing history. Research for this project was supported by grants and fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Art History Publication Initiative, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. She is presently working on three related projects, all of which issue from two years of advanced study in the anthropology of space and governmentality at the University of Chicago under the aegis of an Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship: art and public space in Lebanon during the 1990s; love, temporality, and scale in contemporary art; and artist-imagined and developed arts institutions in the MENAT region between 2001 and 2011. She is also interested in alternative and creative forms of art historical writing and scholarly presentation. She has authored numerous articles about contemporary art and visual culture in publications including Artforum, Art Journal, Frieze, nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, October, and Third Text, as well as in exhibition catalogues published by institutions including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Kunsthalle Zürich, Portikus, Museet for Samtidskunst, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Renaissance Society. Her work has been translated into Euskara, French, German, and Spanish. From 2008-2010, she was Chair of the Art Journal editorial board.

Feldman’s courses range from introductory surveys of art since the 1960s to advanced undergraduate lectures and graduate seminars that consider the intersection of art and urban space in sites of postcolonial and neocolonial conflict; art and protest; art and cinema; participatory aesthetic practices; theories of space and time; decoloniality; theories and models of photographic practice; modernism and postmodernism; and, art in and about the Middle East and North Africa.

From 2011-2015, she was Director of Undergraduate Studies. In 2011, she was elected to the Faculty Honor Roll, and, in 2015 she was awarded the Weinberg College Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research Award. She has mentored PhD dissertations about topics including the art of the Black Panthers, migration in contemporary art in Morocco, transnational protest art during the Vietnam-American war, collective and sociological art practices in post-1968 France, the art of the Lebanese Civil War, contemporary aesthetics in North and South Korea, science and visuality in the American post-WWII period, art and protest in Palestinian art, and queer aesthetics in late-20^th century Germany.

Program Area: Global Modern and Contemporary, Architecture and Urbanism

Regional Specialization: Europe, Middle East and North Africa

Selected Publications

Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

Hannah Feldman, “The Rules of the Game.” In Seductive Exacting Realism. Chicago: Renaissance Society and New York: Sternberg Press, 2015.