Susan Jarosi
Associate Professor of Art History
Susan Jarosi specializes in contemporary art history and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of visuality, visual experience, and visual knowledge. Her research and teaching interests include art and social justice, feminist theory, trauma studies, performance and installation art, digital art history, and interchanges between art and science.
Before Hamilton, Jarosi was an associate professor of art history and visual studies at the University of Louisville, where she held joint faculty appointments in the Women’s & Gender Studies Department and the Fine Arts Department.
One of Jarosi’s current scholarly projects, Inside the Glass Cube, is a critical examination of the ideological functions of vitrines – the ubiquitous vehicles for display in museums, galleries, and numerous other spaces where the “exhibition” of objects happens. This monographic work considers the entanglements of the materiality and affects of vitrines and argues that the compulsion to vitrinize artworks and other objects is a cultural manifestation of the forces of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and racism in the West.
Recent Courses Taught
Art and Social Change
Theories and Methods of Art History
Representations of Trauma
Global Contemporary Art
History of Performance Art
Art and Feminism
Introduction to Art History
Distinctions
- National Science Foundation, Co-PI, “Creating a More Inclusive Biology Curriculum” (RCN-UBE award), 2020-23<
- National Humanities Center, Summer Residency, 2019<
- National Humanities Center, Summer Institute in the Digital Humanities, 2017-18
Select Publications
- “Building and sustaining a more gender-inclusive and just biology education: collaborating across disciplines to explore paths forward,” in preparation.
- “Special Report: COVID-19 and Academic Governance,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 107 (May 2021): 2-41.
- “How to Look at Eclipses Without Being Blinded,” catalog essay for Victory Over the Sun: The Poetics and Politics of Eclipse, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY, August 19-December 3, 2017: https://issuu.com/kmacmuseumky/docs/kmac_victory_essay_issuu
- “Expanded Cinema,” in Meiling Cheng and Gabrielle Cody, eds., Reading Contemporary Performance: Theatricality Across Genres (New York: Routledge, 2016), 201-203.
- With Avery Kolers, “Louisville, Slugged,” Academe: Magazine of the American Association of University Professors 103, no. 3 (May-June 2017): 10-14.
- “The Audience Cries Back,” in Kathryn Brown, ed., Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 155-175.
- “Traumatic Subjectivity and the Continuum of History: Hermann Nitsch’s Orgies Mysteries Theater,” Art History 36, no. 4 (September 2013): 834-863.
- “The Image of the Artist in Performance Art: The Case of Rudolf Schwarzkogler,” Art and Documentation 8 (Spring 2013): 65-77.
- “Recycled Cinema as Material Ecology: Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Found-Footage Films and Computer-Laser-Videos,” Screen 53, no. 3 (Autumn 2012): 228-245.
Professional Affiliations
- Committee on College and University Governance, American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 2016-19
- President, Hamilton College AAUP Chapter, 2021-23
- President, University of Louisville AAUP Chapter, 2017-18
Appointed to the Faculty
2018Educational Background
Ph.D., Duke University
M.A., University of Illinois at Chicago
B.A., University of Virginia
