History & Art History

Ellen Wiley Todd studies art and visual culture of the United States focusing on figurative realism. She also teaches courses on Women and Art, the Museum, and the historiography of Art and Visual Culture. She has published on urban realist paintings of the 1920s and 1930s (The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street, California, 1993), and continues to work on issues of gender, class, and labor in her current project, The Infamous Blaze: Visual Imagery, Historical Memory, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Here she looks at media from photojournalism and editorial cartooning to mural painting and sculpted memorials to understand the shifting meanings of the disaster. She serves as a faculty member in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. She is a past member of the Archives of American Art Advisory Committee, and the American Quarterly advisory board and serve for six years as American Art field editor for caareviews online.

American art history