Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor announced for 2022-23 academic year

Professor Christopher Reed

Christopher Reed, Distinguished Professor of English and Visual Culture at the Pennsylvania State University, has been appointed the 2022-23 Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. He will also be a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. 

Since 2016, the Terra Foundation for American Art has funded an annual Visiting Professorship to promote the study of American art from a global perspective at the University of Oxford and beyond. Each Visiting Professor offers graduate and undergraduate courses in American art, delivers an annual public lecture series, organises a scholarly symposium, and engages in advanced research on the visual and material culture of the United States. 

Professor Geraldine Johnson of the Department of History of Art says: “Thanks to the Terra Foundation’s on-going support of this exciting programme, all of us at Oxford—scholars, curators, and students—and a wider audience through online events gain valuable new insights into American art and culture, while the Visiting Professors are able to develop important new research networks during their time in the UK.” 

Professor Reed directs the interdisciplinary PhD program in Visual Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. His scholarship and teaching engage with a wide range of art and design with an eye to the social significance of visual expression and experience. His books include the award-winning Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (2017), Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (2011), the co-authored If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (2012), Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity (2004), and the anthology Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (1996). 

Professor Geoffrey Batchen, Head of the History of Art Department, says: “We feel fortunate to host Christopher Reed, a scholar who has left his mark on the history of American art. Our students will benefit from his perspective on this history, and we look forward to having him amongst us.” 

At Oxford, Professor Reed will teach an advanced undergraduate course and a Master’s course. Both courses will explore the intersections and overlaps of identity within American art. During his time at Oxford, Professor Reed’s research will follow the paths of Americans in Britain, continental Europe, and Japan, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, in order to understand the impact travel and expatriate experience have had on American understandings of American-ness.   

“It is very exciting to be teaching and writing about the experience of Americans abroad while having the opportunity to be abroad myself,” says Professor Reed. “At Oxford, I am very much looking forward to exploring the rich resources of the University’s museums and libraries, and to conversations with both colleagues and students.”  

The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978, prioritises projects that interrogate and broaden definitions of American art and lends support for projects engaged in transforming or complicating how the story of American art is told. 

To expand histories of American art, the Foundation encourages projects that reflect a commitment to inclusive and equitable research and museum practice; generate new scholarship and interpretive frameworks; employ critical methodologies and innovative models; and/or engage diverse partners and audiences. 

For more information on the Terra Foundation, see: https://www.terraamericanart.org/