Joshua A. Shannon
Contemporary Art History & Theory
Email: shannon1@umd.edu
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 since World War II, and postmodern realism. His first book, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City, was published this year by Yale University Press. The book considers art in New York around 1960 as a complicated means for understanding the postwar transformation of everyday life in that city. Its principal chapters focus on work by Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd. The book is the winner of a Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant from the College Art Association and a General Research Board Award from the University of Maryland. Professor Shannon has also written essays and reviews for the Art Bulletin, the Journal of Modern Craft, and other publications. This fall, he is publishing two short essays on the practice of contemporary art history, in October and in American Art.
He is now at work on a new book project, Archives of the Present: Photographic Realism and the Postmodern Landscape, which aims to provide the first scholarly history of artists' conflicted efforts, over the past fifty years, to make credible representations of contemporary space.
Professor 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 Minimalism, the Art of Gerhard Richter, Photography Since 1989, Methods of Art History, and Models of History in Contemporary Art.
In addition to other awards, Professor Shannon has held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan, a Patricia and Phillip Frost Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a General Research Board Fellowship 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.
In 2009-10, he is on leave in Germany, with the support of the University of Maryland, and as the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität Berlin.

