Lecturer II, History of Art
About
Heather Vinson's teaching and research focus on Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in the United States and Europe, with an emphasis on gender and race theory, critical theory, and the historiography of art history. She teaches Gender and Popular Culture (211; cross-listed with WGS), the survey of Avant-Garde Art in Europe and the U.S. (272); and smaller seminars dealing with mass culture, gender, and the politics of looking. Her publications have analyzed Edgar Degas's ballet pictures in myriad ways: as repetitive and haptic craft, resistant to an emerging art market; as artistic practices analogous to the dancers' daily mnemonic exercises; and as feminine excess in the construction of a Cold War, autonomous modernist art history. Her research draws on theories of memory, time, and social space, as well as formalist and social art-historical methods. She also specializes in the pedagogy of undergraduate research and writing skills. Before returning to teach at UM in 2021, Dr. Vinson taught at numerous institutions, including Kalamazoo College, Colgate University, University of South Florida, and University of West Georgia.
