Ellery started following the work of 7 people.
Ellery started following the work of Zara Anishanslin, City University of New York College of Staten Island, History.
Ellery started following the work of 10 people.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Post-Doc, Art History & Center for the Humanities
University of Pennsylvania, History of Art
Williams College, Graduate Program in the History of Art
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Thesis Title: Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale's Butterflies, Heade's Hummingbirds, Blaschka's Flowers, and Sandow's Body
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Michael Leja
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About
I recently began a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Center for the Humanities with the Department of Art History (thank you, Mellon Foundation!). I'm excited to be teaching a course on "The Art of Natural History," which examines intertwined notions of art and science from the early modern period to the present, with special focus on the 19th & 20th centuries. Given UW's rich natural history collections (Geological Museum, Zoological Museum, Botanic Gardens & Greenhouses as well as the State Herbarium), we'll be studying many 19th-c. specimens, models, and historical artifacts firsthand; we'll also be taking a field trip to Milwaukee to see some of Carl Akeley's first dioramas. At the end of the semester, we'll turn to contemporary artists' engagement with the traditions and aesthetics of natural history or current trends in science: Walton Ford, Mark Dion, Laura Splan, Marc Quinn, to name a few.
I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 with a dissertation titled "Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale's Butterflies, Heade's Hummingbirds, Blaschka's Flowers, and Sandow's Body" (abstract below).
The pursuit of perfection pervades 19th-century American art and culture. While historical interpretations of this era posit a binary opposition of competing desires—an embrace of progress and new technologies, versus anti-modernist nostalgia—my work identifies and analyzes a previously unstudied phenomenon: the desire to stop time at a “perfect moment,” pausing the cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth to arrest and preserve a perfect state, forestalling decay or death. Four case studies in diverse visual media illuminate this notion of the perfect moment: Titian Peale’s Lepidoptera portfolios and specimen cases; Martin Johnson Heade’s “Gems of Brazil” hummingbird paintings; films, photographs, and sculptures of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow; and Harvard’s collection of Blaschka Glass Flowers.
Contact Information
| Address: | Department of Art History |
