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Department ofArt and Art History

Andrea Pappas

Andrea Pappas

Associate Professor

Curriculum Vitae (CV)


Educational Background

Ph.D., University of Southern California, Art History
M.A., University of Southern California, Art History
B.A., University of California at Berkeley, Fine Arts

Research

Marketing Modernism in New York, 1929-1959
Jewish-American art
American Women in the Visual Arts
Editorial Board: Modern Jewish Studies

My most recent book, Embroidering the Landscape: Art, Women and the Environment in British North America, 1740-1770 is available from Lund-Humphries Publishing. Part of their Northern Lights series, it examines women's large embroidered landscape from an environmental history perspective. These needlework pictures have generally been seen as leisure activities that testify to the wealth and taste of their families. However, women made these works in the midst of an ongoing campaign of settler colonialism, the first agricultural revolution, the global trade in plants and animals, all of which resulted in extensive, irrevocable changes to the environment. Thus my book looks at these stitched artworks from an environmental history perspective. Along the way, I look at women's kitchen gardens, cookbooks, colonial environmental law, and the discourses of natural history, botany, and entomology. I recently contributed a chapter to a new book on Mark Rothko's Houston Chapel, Revisiting the Rothko Chapel, edited by Annie Cohen-Solal and Aaron Rosen. My 2023 sabbatical project will see me researching and writing about further material culture topics. I am an art historian who works on art and visual/material culture, primarily of Anglophone North America, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries and I have written on a wide range of topics, including women artists and art dealers, Mark Rothko's early work, Jewish American art and visual culture, and I have done some curatorial work.

I am interested in questions about both the production (artist-centered) and reception (audience-centered) aspects of art, visual, and material culture. I have published on topics ranging from the Renaissance to the present and am particularly interested in the work of people on the margins or in overlooked artifacts.

Courses
  • ARTH 11A & 12A C&I Trading Places: Art, Trade, and Culture Exchange
  • ARTH 22 Art in the Age of Exploration: Early Modern Europe
  • ARTH 23 Art and Revolution: Europe and the U.S. 18th-20th Centuries
  • ARTH 100 Art History Proseminar
  • ARTH 140 Photography in the United States
  • ARTH 143 Women's Work: American Women in the Visual Arts
  • ARTH 144 Race, Gender, and Nation in 18th and 19th-Century American Art
  • ARTH 145 Perpetual Revolution: American Art in the 20th-Century