Joshua A. Shannon
Assistant Professor
Contemporary Art History & Theory

Art History & Archaeology
4204 Art/Sociology Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335
Telephone: 301-405-1485
Email: shannon1@umd.edu

Joshua A. Shannon (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2003) is a specialist in the history and theory of art since 1945. His areas of research and teaching interest include art and the city, art and globalization, photography since World War II, and representations of history in contemporary art.

His book  The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City, 1960 , will be published by Yale University Press in Spring, 2009. The book considers art in New York around 1960 as a complicated engagement with the rising abstraction, in the period, of the city's economy and architecture. Its principal chapters focus on art by Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Donald Judd. A section of the book appeared in The Art Bulletin in March 2004, under the title “Claes Oldenburg's The Street and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960.” Since then, Professor Shannon has delivered related lectures in Amsterdam, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Manchester, New York, and Washington.

He is beginning a new book project on landscape art since 1989.

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. His recent graduate seminars have included courses on methods of Art History, Minimalism, Photography since 1989, 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.