Professor Erin Pauwels

Professor Erin Pauwels has been appointed the 2024-25 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art in the Department of History of Art. She is an Associate Professor of American Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and specialises in the history of photography, media theory, and ecocriticism, with a particular interest in the intersections between theatre and the visual arts. She received her PhD in Art History and American Studies from Indiana University and previously taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her post at Oxford is very generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

In 2023, her book Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York was published by the Pennsylvania State University Press. It reconstructs the legacy of America's first celebrity photographer and reveals how the emergence of mass media reshaped traditional definitions of art. While at Oxford, Professor Pauwels will work on a new monograph that explores the social architecture of photography by considering how studio portraits of Native American subjects were staged and circulated during the 19th and early 20th century. 

Professor Pauwels will teach an undergraduate survey course at Oxford on American art from the 17th century to the present day. She will offer as well a Master's course on art and environmental thought that focuses on how land, animals, and material resources have inspired the art and, more broadly, the visual and material culture of the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. 

During her time in Oxford, Professor Pauwels will also be a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, where she will deliver the annual Terra Lectures in American Art in the Spring of 2025. The lectures will be open to staff and students at Oxford, as well as to the wider public.

Photo credit: Rachael Reynolds