Alan Braddock
September 2016 – June 2017 Visiting Professor of Architecture and the Princeton Environmental Institute Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities
Biography
Braddock is the Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. He uses ecocritical interpretation to explore the environmental contexts and implications of creative work, mainly focusing on the visual arts and material culture of North America since the colonial period. Braddock is the author of “Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity” (2009) and the co-editor of “A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History” (2009) with Christoph Irmscher, and “A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination” (2016) with Laura Turner Igoe. Braddock’s articles and essay have appeared in the journals American Art, Winterthur Portfolio, American Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and the Wiley-Blackwell “Companion to American Art.” He also has published in exhibition catalogs organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Delaware Art Museum. He has written for National Public Radio’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog, and co-founded the Virtual Museum of Posthumanist Art in 2015. Braddock received a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware, a master’s degree in library science from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in history of art from Johns Hopkins University.
While at Princeton
Braddock conducted research, writing and logistical preparation for the Fall 2018 Princeton University Art Museum exhibition, “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” which will trace through three centuries of creative visual work environmental change and the emergence of ecological consciousness as a defining idea in modernity. The exhibition will include more than 100 important works of American art in various media and genres, many borrowed from museums around the United States. The exhibition will travel to the Peabody Essex Museum and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Braddock will co-author and co-edit a 300-page book accompanying the exhibition to be published by the Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press.
Braddock also taught the courses “Art History in the Anthropocene” — an international survey of art and environmental history since 1800 — and “The Ecocritical Exhibition,” in which students examined the environmental impacts of the “Nature’s Nation” exhibition, including the carbon footprint of art object loans, facilities, publications and more, while learning about sustainability in art museums around the world. In both courses, students engaged the collections and resources of the Princeton University Art Museum extensively.
In the Fall 2016, Braddock gave a public talk about his book “A Greene Country Towne” at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative forum on “The Nature of Cities” and served as a faculty respondent at the graduate student symposium, “Water and the Making of Place in North America,” sponsored by Princeton’s Program in American Studies. In Spring 2017, Braddock organized the all-day PEI symposium, “Art of Environmental Justice in an Expanded Field,” featuring presentations by prominent international contemporary artists.