bryan jay wolf - Department of Art & Art History - Stanford University

BRYAN JAY WOLF
Jeanette and William Hayden Jones Professor in American Art and Culture
Department of Art and Art History, and by courtesy, Department of English
Co-Director, Stanford Arts Initiative, 2006-11
Co-Director, Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa), 2006-11
Stanford University, CA 94305-2018
650-723-4964
EDUCATION
Doctor of Philosophy, American Studies Program, Yale University, 1977
Master of Arts in Religion, Yale Divinity School, 1971
Bachelor of Arts (English major), Rice University, 1969
APPPOINTMENTS
Stanford: Art and Art History, 2002-
Executive Committee, American Studies Program, 2002-
Committee in Charge, Modern Thought and Literature Program, 2002-6
Yale University: Professor of American Studies and English, 1976-2002
Charles B. G. Murphy Associate Professor (endowed chair for non-tenured
faculty), 1982-84
Resident Faculty, Yale-in-London, 1983-84
TEACHING: SUMMER PROGRAMS
Stanford Teachers Studio, 2009, 2010, 2011
Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont, Summer, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1997,
1998, 1999, 2000, 2003
Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2001
PUBLICATIONS: BOOKS
American Encounters: Art, History, and Culture. A co-authored textbook (Prentice Hall,
2007)
Vermeer and The Invention of Seeing (The University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth Century American
Painting and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 1982)

PUBLICATIONS (in progress):
Seeing Through History
An exploration of the ways that three artists have responded to the historical
events that have shaped their worlds: Philip Guston and the Holocaust, Martin
Puryear and the Civil Rights Movement, and William Kentridge and South
African apartheid.
The Dream of Transparency
The Dream of Transparency focuses on the origins of liberal belief in the
eighteenth century and its relation to visual culture. Focusing on British painter
Joseph Wright of Derby, and concluding with antebellum American painting, the
book explores the way that seeing works historically to affirm the tenets of liberal
belief: that the world is stable and inert, that the individual has agency within that
world, that the individual’s relation to the environment forms a seamless whole.
PUBLICATIONS: ARTICLES (selected)
“Writing History, Reading Art: A Response to Rachel DeLue’s ‘The Challenge of
Contemporaneity, or, Thoughts on Art as Culture’,” Blackwell Companion to
American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, Jason LaFontaine (forthcoming,
2013)
“Up/Down in Two Sculptures by Martin Puryear,” American Art 25 (Spring, 2011), 22-4
“Jules Prown and American Art History,” College Art Association Distinguished Scholar
2010, CAA News, November, 2010
“Holland of the Imagination,” exhibition catalogue co-authored with Christopher Wood,
Yale University Art Gallery, 2001
"Signs of the Times: A Brief Cultural History of Sign Painting" in Lions & Eagles &
Bulls: Early American Tavern and Inn Signs from the Connecticut Historical
Society, ed. Susan Schoelwer (Princeton University Press, 2000)
"Entering Multiculturalism," On Common Ground 7 (1996), 11-12.
"History as Ideology, Or, What You Don't See Can't Hurt You, Mr. Bingham" in
Redefining American History Painting ed. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Giese,
Cambridge University Press, 1995, 242-62.
“The Responsibility to Dream," 1994 Presidential Forum, Modern Language Association,
Profession 95, 19-26.
"Framing the Subject: Thomas Eakins' Portrait of Henry A. Rowland" in Thomas Eakins,
exhibition catalogue ed. by John Hayes and John Wilmerding, The National
Portrait Gallery, London, 1993.
"The Labor of Seeing: Pragmatism, Ideology, and Gender in Winslow Homer's The
Morning Bell," Prospects 17 (1992), 275-320.
"How the West Was Hung, Or, When I Hear the Word 'Culture' I Take Out My
Checkbook," American Quarterly 44 (September, 1992), 418-38.
"Firing the Canon," Introduction to a Symposium at the American Studies Association
Convention, 1990, American Literary History 3 (Winter, 1991), 707-10.
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"What the Cow Saw: The Innocent Eye and Nineteenth Century Painting," Antiques 137
(January, 1990), 276-85.
"Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Painting, Literature and Other Unnatural Relations,"
Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (Spring, 1990), 181-204.
"When is a Painting Most Like a Whale? Ishmael, Moby-Dick and the Sublime" in New
Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Richard Brodhead, Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Reprinted (abridged) in Herman Melville. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by
Myra Jehlen in New Century Views, 1995.
"All the World's A Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth Century American Painting,"
Art Journal 44 (Winter,1984), 328-37.
"A Grammar of the Sublime, or Intertextuality Triumphant in Church, Turner and Cole,"
New Literary History XVI (Winter, 1985), 321-41.
"Revolution in the Landscape: John Trumbull and Picturesque Painting," in John
Trumbull: "The Hand and Spirit of a Painter," Yale University Press, 1982.
"Washington Allston and the Aesthetics of Parody," Georgia Review XXXIV
(Summer, 1980), 333-56
REVIEWS (selected)
Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp
in Journal of American History, Dec, 2005, 1005-6
Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose. Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance, in
The Art Bulletin 83, No 3, Sept 2001, 566-9
Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, catalogue and exhibition organized and edited by
William Truettner and Alan Wallach, Journal of American History, Vol 83 (Dec
1996), 958-62.
Nancy Rash, The Painting and Politics of George Caleb Bingham, in The Times Literary
Supplement, June 21, 1991, p. 17
Alfred Kazin, A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature and Ian Bell and D.K.
Adams, eds., American Literary Landscapes: The Fiction and the Fact, in The
Times Literary Supplement, June 16-22, 1989, p. 672.
Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, in The Times Literary Supplement,
January 29, 1988, p. 114.
"The Fall of Niagara," an essay review of Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls and related
works in Winterthur Portfolio, Vol 22 (Spring 1987), 81-86.
Helen Cooper, Winslow Homer Watercolors, in The Times Literary Supplement, January
2, 1987, p. 17.
John P. Driscoll and John K. Howatt, John Frederick Kensett, in The Times Literary
Supplement, November 22, 1985.
"An 'Eye' for an 'I': American Romantic Painting of the Nineteenth Century," an essay
review of American Light, in Georgia Review XXXV, 1981, 195-99.
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HONORS
Wyeth Lecture in American Art, “Between the Lines: Philip Guston and ‘Bad Painting’,”
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, DC,
October 19, 2011
Violet Andrews Whittier Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, 2005-6
The Frey Lectures in American Studies, University of North Carolina, a series of
endowed lectures, spring, 2001
Commencement Address, Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, 2000
Robert Frost Professor, Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, 1999
Alumni Distinguished Lecture, Department of Art History, University of Delaware, May,
1998
Visiting Critic, Residency Program, Williams College, March, 1998
A. Whitney Griswold Fund Award, Yale University: to study seventeenth-century Dutch
art, 1994; to study the paintings of Vermeer, 1984; to study the paintings of
Caspar David Friedrich, 1977
Doris and Harry Rubin Lecture, Metropolitan Museum, New York, May, 1993
Elizabeth Drew Memorial Lecture, Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College,
1988
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1987-88
Young Alumni Achievement Award, Association of Rice University Alumni, 1987
William Clyde DeVane Medal for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale
College, Yale Chapter, Phi Beta Kappa, 1987
Mellon Fellowship, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, 1981-82
Morse Fellowship, Yale University, for a year's leave of absence, 1978-79
Selected one of Ten Outstanding Teachers at Yale, Yale Course Critique, 1977
STUDENT AWARDS
Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities for "exceptionally promising graduate students
during their final dissertation year," Yale University, 1974-75
Tew Prize for "exceptional ability in philosophy and literature," Yale Divinity School,
1971
Danforth Fellowship, Yale University, 1969-75
Ford Foundation Summer Grant, Rice University, 1967
Robert Welch Foundation Interscholastic League Scholarship, Rice University, 1964
CONFERENCES (selected)
“Seeing as a Form of Intellectual Labor in the Nineteenth Century,” American Art
History Reconsidered, Vassar College, November 11, 2012
“The Art of American Studies,” Co-Chair, Roundtable, American Studies Association
Convention, November 18-21, 2010
“Celia Muñoz and the Question of Reading,” Litquake, San Francisco, October, 2010
“No Ideas But in Things: Martin Puryear and Language,” Geographies of Art: Sur Le
Terrain, Terra Foundation Conference, June 17-19, 2010
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“In the Aftermath of Grace: Art, Transcendence and Contemporary Culture,” Stanford
University Conference on “Grace,” May, 2009
“Twenty-first Century American Art History: Boundaries, Theories, Practices,” Clark Art
Institute, December, 2007
“Sexuality and Agency in the Art of Thomas Eakins,” Surface, Space, and Interface,
Harvard University, November, 2004
“Nineteenth-Century Landscapes, Twentieth-Century Eyes: Rethinking Hudson River
School Painting,” New Light on American Landscape Painting, Symposium, New
York Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 23, 2004
Keynote Address, Opening of “The Hudson River School: Masterworks from the
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art,” Cantor Arts Center, Oct, 2003
“Landscape and Modernity,” Current Practices in American Literary and Cultural Study,
Rice University, May 2002
Co-organizer with Christopher Woods, Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: The
Dutch Experience, Yale University, February, 2002
"The Innocent Eye: Postmodernism and Nineteenth Century American Landscape Art,"
keynote address, European American Studies Association, Graz, Austria, April,
2000
Co-organizer, "Drawing Connections: Studies in American Visual Culture, Circa 1996,"
Stanford University, May 3-4, 1996
"Teapots and Air Pumps: Copley, Wright of Derby and Modernity," Symposium on John
Singleton Copley, New York Metropolitan Museum, October, 1995
" 'The Birth of the Jalapeno': Rethinking the Notion of Regionalism," Symposium on
Southern Literature, Yale University, May, 1995
"Descartes' Revenge, Or Identity without Bodies," Symposium on "Identity in American
Art and Culture," Harvard University, October, 1994
COMMITTEES AND ORGANIZATIONS (selected)
Faculty Representative, Stanford Board of Trustees, Committee for Alumni and External
Affairs, 2010-12
Faculty Senate, Stanford University, 2011-12
Program Committee, Bing Concert Hall, 2010-12
Undergraduate Advisory Committee, Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate
Education, 2011-12
Chair, Appointment Committee, Thoma Chair in Art and Humanities, 2011-12
Chair, Search Committee, Halperin Chair in 20 th Century American Art History, 2010-11
Chair, Search Committee, Distinguished Senior Professor, Art History, 2007
Film Studies Executive Committee, Stanford University, 2004-5
Associate Chair, Art and Art History, Stanford University, 2002-5
Organizer, "Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: The Dutch Experience," Whitney
Humanities Center, Yale University, February, 2002
Chair, American Studies Program, Yale University, 1997-2000
Co-organizer, "Drawing Connections: Studies in American Visual Culture, Circa 1996,"
Stanford University, May 3-4, 1996
Peer Review Committee, Huntington Library, 1996-1999, 2006-
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Chair, Search Committee, Assistant Dean and Coordinator of Chicano Student Affairs,
Yale University, 1993-4; 1997
Publications Committee, Yale University Press, 1993-1997
Board of Trustees, Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford, Ct, 1993-6
University Advisory Council, Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, 1993-2002
Advisory Panel, Weir Farm National Park Historic Site, 1992
Program Committee, American Studies Association Convention, New Orleans, 1990
Selection Committee, Eldredge Prize for outstanding publication in American art history,
National Museum of American Art, 1989-91
Editorial Board, Yale Journal of Criticism, 1986-90
Advisory Board, Yale Journal of Criticism, 1990-2000
Editorial Board, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 1988-96
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