FACULTY


Jennifer Greenhill
Assistant Professor
Art History: Art of the United States

jgreenhi@illinois.edu | CV

Teaching areas:

Visual, literary and material culture of the United States

Research areas:

Visual and literary humor, illustration, intersections between elite and popular forms of expression, race and ethnicity, American art institutions, Anglo-American exchange, word and image relations

Degrees:

B.A. UCLA, M.A. Williams College, Ph.D. Yale University

Jennifer Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Art History and advisor for the undergraduate Art History majors in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. She specializes in nineteenth-century American visual and material culture, but also publishes on American literature and on twentieth-century topics. She is currently at work on two books: a co-edited collection of dialogues between leading scholars of American art on the subject of interpretive practice, and a study of American visual humor and the culture of art in the United States after the Civil War. This study on humor asks how the pressure to make serious, so-called “high” art became entangled in and informed by the “plague of jocularity” seen to be virally spreading during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation, the Smithsonian, Winterthur and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Selected Work

Publications include:

  • Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the U.S. between the Civil War and the World's Columbian Exposition (under contract with UC Press)

  • "Probing the Unknown with George du Maurier and Charles Dana Gibson," forthcoming in Art History and a Blackwell Press collection

  • “Illustrating the Shadow of Doubt: Henry James, Blindness, and the ‘The Real Thing’” in Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships (International Association of Word and Image Studies, 2009)

  • “Winslow Homer and the Mechanics of Visual Deadpan,” Art History (April 2009)

  • “The View from Outside: Rockwell and Race in 1950,” American Art (Summer 2007)

  • “Playing the Fool: David Claypoole Johnston and the Menial Labor of Caricature,” American Art (Fall 2003)

Courses include:

Undergraduate: Representation in the U.S., 1750-1900; British and American Visual Humo(u)r, 1760-1900; American Visual Humor, 1850-1915; Early American Modernism; Norman Rockwell and Art of Illustration (with a substantial film component).

Graduate: Between “high” and “low”: defining art in late 19th-centry American society; Materiality c. 1900; Theory and Methodology.

Race and representation in the U.S. and Britain, c. 1890-1925