Renée Ater, Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Maryland
American Art

Anthony Colantuono, Associate Professor
Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University
Seventeenth-Century Italian, French, and Spanish Art

Meredith J. Gill, Associate Professor
Ph.D. Princeton University
Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italian Renaissance Art

June Hargrove, Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Nineteenth-Century European Painting and Sculpture

Shannen Hill, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison
African Art

Jason Kuo, Professor
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Chinese Art

Steven A. Mansbach, Professor
Ph.D. Cornell University
Twentieth-Century Art

Abigail McEwen, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. New York University
Latin American Art

William L. Pressly, Professor and Chair
Ph.D. New York University
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art

Joshua Shannon, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley
Contemporary Art History & Theory

Yui Suzuki, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles
Japanese Art

Marjorie S. Venit, Professor and Scheduling Officer
Ph.D. New York University
Ancient Mediterranean Art History & Archaeology

Alicia Volk, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. Yale University
Japanese Art

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Professor
Ph.D. Harvard University
Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Art

Distinguished Affiliates

Franklin Kelly
Ph.D. University of Delaware
American Art

Richard Spear
Ph.D. Princeton University
Italian Baroque Art

Emeriti and Adjunct Faculty

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Joshua Shannon
Contemporary Art History & Theory

4204 Art/Sociology Building

Email: shannon1@umd.edu

Telephone: 301-405-1485

Joshua Shannon is a specialist in the history and theory of art since 1945. His areas of research and teaching interest include art and the city, landscape art, photography, conceptual art, and modern and contemporary realism.

Professor Shannon's first book, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City, was published by Yale University Press in 2009. Focusing on works by Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd, the book shows how New York art engaged with the rapid transformation of everyday life around 1960. The Disappearance of Objects argues that these four artists - all living amid the rapid rebuilding of New York in this period - filled their art with old street signs, outmoded flashlights, and other discarded objects in a richly revealing effort to understand the new, abstract texture of urban life. A finalist for the book prize of the Phillips Collection's Center for the Study of Modern Art, the book also won a Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant from the College Art Association and a General Research Board Award from the University of Maryland.

Shannon is currently working on a new book to be called The Recording Machine: Art and Fact, 1968. The book seeks to understand why so many artists in the Cold-War West around 1968 seemed to reject art's traditional aims of essentialist truth-telling in favor of mere presentation of unsynthesized fact. ("My pictures," one artist declared, "are simply a collection of facts"; "What is good about a picture," another wrote, "is always factual.") The book considers the wide diffusion of this factualist impulse across many artistic movements in North America and Europe. Throughout, it considers the art's relationship to contemporary rhetorics of objectivity, randomness, and quantification - rhetorics bound to such public phenomena as the rise of information science, Robert McNamara's statistical management of the Vietnam War, and the problem of interpreting espionage data. The Recording Machine understands this art as a richly ambivalent inquiry - undertaken in the context of technocracy - into the feasibility and morality of disinterested reason. Its four main chapters are focused respectively on conceptual photography, art in the desert, photorealist painting, and the art of Gerhard Richter; a conclusion considers staged photography of the last twenty years.

Professor Shannon has also published essays and reviews in American Art, Art Bulletin, October, and the Journal of Modern Craft, among other publications. For a list of publications, [click here].

Shannon's teaching is informed by the social history of art, by postmodern theories of culture and representation, and by the practice of close looking. Topics of his recent graduate seminars have included Conceptual Art, Minimalism, the Art of Gerhard Richter, Photography Since 1989, Methods of Art History, and Models of History in Contemporary Art. Since 2010, he has been Director of Undergraduate Studies for the department.

In addition to other awards, Professor Shannon has held the Terra Visiting Professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and two General Research Board Fellowships at the University of Maryland. He is a founding director of Contemporary Art Think Tank and a founding board member of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians.