Dr. Michael Leja

Biography

Michael Leja studies the visual arts media including painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, and illustrations from the 19th and 20th centuries, primarily in the United States. His work is interdisciplinary and strives to understand visual artifacts in relation to contemporary cultural, social, political, and intellectual developments. He is particularly interested in examining the interactions between works of art and specific audiences. His book 'Looking Askance: Skepticism in American Art from Eakins to Duchamp' (2004) traces the ways in which visual arts engage with forms of skepticism that are prevalent in modern life, particularly in northeastern American cities from 1869 to 1917. He won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2005. Another of his notable publications, 'Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity in Painting of the 1940s' (1993), situates the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman within a culture-wide initiative to re-imagine the self amidst a traumatic history. He is currently working on a book that explores changes in pictorial forms and social relations associated with industrialization and the development of mass market images in the mid-nineteenth century.

Research Interests