PhD University of Michigan

James Denison researches and teaches about the relationships between visual representations, their makers, and systems of identity and power formation in modern societies, with a special focus on art and popular visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States. A graduate of Bowdoin College, he completed a PhD in art history at the University of Michigan, where he wrote a dissertation on the connections between the group of American modernists known as the Stieglitz Circle and racism in the interwar United States. After graduating he was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor of art history at Kalamazoo College and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. He has also held fellowships from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and published scholarly writing in the journals Word & Image, Panorama, Art Journal, and CAA.reviews. He has taught survey courses on modern art and art in the U.S. and seminars on literary and visual cultures of early twentieth-century popular fiction, race and visual representation in the U.S., and photography, empire, and colonialism. His courses often incorporate objects from across the spectrum of cultural prestige, focus on engagement with social and political problems, and emphasize connections between the past and our present. He is currently working on his book project focused on the Stieglitz artists.