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Professor of Art History
ottjw@jmu.edu
Contact Info

Education

Ph.D. Art History, UCLA
M.A. Art History, UCLA
B.A. Art History & English Literature, Stanford

Areas of Expertise

Art History of the US before 1960
African American Art History
Art Markets

Selected Honors & Awards (2017–Present)
  • Ray and Margaret Horowitz Visiting Professor in American Art, Department of History of Art & Architecture, Boston University, 2021–22
  • Research Fellow, Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby College, 2019–20
  • Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2019
  • American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant, 2018–19
Scholarship (2017-present)

Books: 

Muybridge and Mobility, with Tim Cresswell. Defining Moments in Photography, ed. Anthony Lee (University of California Press, 2022).

Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Ashgate Press, 2014; Routledge, 2016). 

Essays: 

“Archives and the Pandemic,” Archives of American Art 60:1 (Spring 2021), 84–85.

“African American Art Beyond the Harlem Renaissance,” in Eddie Chambers, ed., The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (London: Routledge, 2020), 41–51.

“Occidental Arrangements: Midcentury Episodes in an Emerging Global History of Art,” in Sandra Zalman and Austin Porter, eds., Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 197–213.

“Art and Economics” (co-edited with Robin Veder), American Art 33:3 (Fall 2019): 2–31.

“Hale Woodruff’s Antiprimitivist History of Abstract Art,” Art Bulletin 100:1 (March 2018): 124–45.

“Metropolitan, Inc.: Public Subsidy and Private Gain at the Genesis of the American Art Museum,” in Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner, eds., New York, Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age (London: Routledge, 2018), 122–38.

“Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology,” in Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe, eds., A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia, Ecology, and the Material Imagination (Penn State University Press, 2017), 81–95. 

Forthcoming:

Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954.

“Westward Hoe! Evolution, Eugenics, and the Reception of Millet in the United States,” in Scott Allen, ed., Reckoning with Millet’s Man With a Hoe (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023).

“Man Versus Rock: Race, Labor, and Maynard Dixon’s Boulder Dam Suite,” in Ann Wolfe, ed., Maynard Dixon: Nevada (New York: Rizzoli, 2024).

Professional Affiliations
  • Association for Critical Race Art History
  • Association of Historians of American Art
  • American Studies Association
  • College Art Association
  • Southeastern College Art Conference

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