Founders
Andrés Mario Zervigón
zervigon (at) rutgers (dot) edu
Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers,The State University of New Jersey. His research generally focuses upon moments in history when lens-based media prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual. Zervigón's first book, John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the Weimar-era work of this German artist and the crisis of photographic representation generating his highly political photomontage. His second book, Photography and Germany, explores the medium’s history in establishing visions of the country and constructions of German identity. His current book project, The Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, a History of Germany’s Other Avant-Garde, focuses on the extraordinary pictorial innovations of this radical left-wing periodical. He received a Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts to support this project. Zervigón has published articles and reviews in New German Critique, Visual Resources, October, History of Photography, Études Photographiques, and Rundbrief Fotografie, and he contributed to the catalogs Avant-Art in Everyday Life (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2011) and Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (Metropolitan Museum, NYC, 2013).
Tanya SHEEHAN
Tanya Sheehan is Distinguished Scholar and Director of Research at the Lunder Institute for American Art, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art at Colby College. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited books include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (2015, with Andres Zervigon), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), and Photography and Migration (2018). Since 2015 she has served as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal.
COLLABORATORS
Maria Garth
Maria V. Garth is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. She studies modern and contemporary art and the history and theory of photography with a specialization in Eastern European, Russian, and Soviet visual culture. Her dissertation addresses the legacy of women photographers in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and 1980s. As a Dodge Avenir Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum, she works in the Department of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art researching the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. At the Zimmerli, Maria recently curated the exhibition Communism Through the Lens: Everyday Life Captured by Women Photographers in the Dodge Collection (2021), which can still be viewed online as a virtual presentation. Maria earned an M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her article, “Painting, Photography, and Radical Depictions of Gender: Franz Gertsch and Lissa Rivera,” appeared in SEQUITUR (vol. 6:1, 2019).
William Green
William Green is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. He studies the history of photography with an emphasis on post-WWII American photography, photobooks, and the materiality of photographs. Prior to Rutgers, William was the curatorial assistant in the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. While working at the Eastman Museum, he curated numerous exhibitions, including Nandita Raman: Cinema Play House; contributed to various publications, including the exhibition catalog A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age; and coordinated the department’s acquisitions.
Kaitlin Booher
Kaitlin Booher is a PhD candidate in Art History at Rutgers University. She studies the history of photography with attention to its technical and aesthetic transformations, its social history, and its use as tool for communication at the turn of the 20th century. Her dissertation “Fashioning an Industry: Photography at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Economics” first study of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue’s role in the dissemination of modern photography in the first half of the 20th century. Prior to Rutgers, Kaitlin was a curatorial consultant in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art and assistant curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Her exhibitions include “Alex Prager: Face in the Crowd” (2013) and “Shooting Stars: Publicity Stills from Early Hollywood and Portraits by Andy Warhol.”
Virginia McBride
Virginia McBride is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Rutgers, where she studies modernist photography. Focusing on Soviet and European photomontage, she investigates interactive modes of photographic dissemination and display in the interwar period. She is also a research assistant in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Photographs, where she recently curated a selection of works from the Museum's permanent collection. She has previously held positions at the Museum of Modern Art and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Sookyung “Vero” Chai
Sookyung “Vero” Chai is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the cross-fertilization of photography and literature with attention to the politics of visuality, race, memory, and the archive particularly in photo-textual practices that involve found visual records. Prior to Rutgers, Vero earned an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University, where she wrote her thesis on family portraits and snapshots to explore vernacular photography as a trialectical site of documentary evidence, counter-memory, and ideological articulation. Her article “Editing the Archive: Alexandra Bell’s Annotation, Redaction, and Epistemic Resistance in Counternarratives” appeared in Art Journal (vol. 80:2, 2021).
Julian Wong-Nelson
Julian Wong-Nelson is a third year PhD student in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Art History program. Their research interests include Asian-diasporic performance, photography, and video, queer & trans* theory, and cinema studies.