Faculty News - Professor Vanessa Meikle Schulman
This year we have a new addition to the Art History faculty, Professor Vanessa Meikle Schulman. Professor Schulman came to Mason after teaching at Illinois State University for five years. She is a specialist in the art and visual culture of the United States, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. At Mason, she will be offering classes on colonial through 20th-century American art and architecture, history of photography, and other thematic art history courses.
She received her PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine, in 2010, and has published her research in the academic journals Invisible Culture, American Periodicals, and Early Popular Visual Culture.
Her book, Work Sites: The Visual Culture of Industry in Nineteenth-Century America, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, was the winner of the 2016 International Committee for the History of Technology book prize for junior scholars and was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2016. Her research seeks to illuminate the complex construction of American national identities through “fine” art and more popularly disseminated forms of visual culture such as photographs, prints, and illustrated newspapers. She is excited to take advantage of the numerous research resources for American art available in the Washington, D.C., area.