Catherine M. Soussloff’s research explores the historiography, theory, and philosophy of art and visual culture in the European tradition from the Early Modern period (ca. 1400) to the present. She has authored and edited books and written over fifty essays and articles in art history and in a wide range of related fields, including performance studies, aesthetics, Jewish studies, the history of photography, and visual studies. She has lectured extensively in Canada, Europe, the UK, the USA, and South America. Professor Soussloff has advised and supervised MA and PhD students in Art History, Visual and Cultural Studies, History of Consciousness, Literature, and History. Known for her comparative and historical approaches to the central theoretical concerns of art history and aesthetics, Soussloff’s most recent publications have focused on contemporary art, performance, Picasso’s late work, and the aesthetic theories of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Her book on Michel Foucault and painting theory in the twentieth century was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2017. Her edited volume Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016, includes twelve essays by experts in six disciplines and an introduction and essay on Gilles Deleuze’s views of Foucault’s contribution to philosophy written by Soussloff. Soussloff’s lectures on Foucault given at the Collège de France in Paris may be accessed at www.college-de-france.fr. Her views on Foucault are featured in the Slovenian art mockumentary: MY NAME IS JANEZ JANŠA (dir. Janez Jansa).

Before coming to UBC in 2010 as Head of the department, Professor Soussloff taught for twenty-four years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she held a prestigious University of California Presidential Chair in Visual and Performance Studies and the first Patricia and Rowland Rebele Chair in the History of Art. For twelve years Soussloff was Director of Visual and Performance Studies, an international and multi-disciplinary faculty-graduate research initiative. In that capacity she programmed major conferences and an annual seminar series, funded by competitively awarded grants. She served as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Art Journal (College Art Association of America) and she was a founding book reviews editor of Images: Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. For two years she was a member of the board of Live Vancouver, the city’s performance art biennale.

Professor Soussloff has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Getty Research Institute, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the College Art Association of America, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and the Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In summer 2011 Soussloff was resident at the University of California, Irvine where she held a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar fellowship for the study of Walter Benjamin’s Later Writings. During the academic year 2013–14 Catherine M. Soussloff was a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. In spring of 2017 Professor Soussloff was an Invited Researcher at the Institut Nationale d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) in Paris where she pursued the topic of expressivity and art.

PUBLICATIONS

Books (peer-reviewed presses)

Author: Foucault on Painting, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Editor: Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21^st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, in the series: Global Aesthetics Research, London: Rowman and Littlefield International Limited, 2016.

Senior Editor: Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2^nd Edition, edited by Michael Kelly, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 6 vols.

Consultant Editor: The Handbook of Visual Culture, edited by Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell, London and New York: Berg, 2012.

Co-editor: Editing the Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the Visual, edited by Mark Cheetham, Elizabeth Legge, and Catherine M. Soussloff, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Author: The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.                       

Editor: Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999.

Author: The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Articles (peer-reviewed journals)

“Painting for Fools: Foucault and Klossowski,” Theory, Culture & Society 37 (Winter 2020): in press, 9818 words.

“Historiography and Negativity in the Paintings of Chaim Soutine,” Images: Journal of Jewish Visual Culture, (Winter 2018), 117-140.

“Art History’s Dilemma: Theories for Time in Contemporary Performance/Media Exhibitions,” Performance Research (PRJ) 19 (Fall 2014) Special Issue on Time: 93-100.

“Approaching the Curator Critically,” Collections, Special issue “The Task of the Curator,” 7, no. 4 (2011): 385-389.

“Foucault on Painting,” History of the Human Sciences (HHS) 24 (2011): 113-123.

Editor and author of Introduction: Unfolding the Baroque: Cultures and Concepts, Special issue of Ars Aeterna (Slovakia: Constantine the Philosopher University of Nitra, Faculty of Arts) 2 (2010), 169 pages.

“The New Jewish Visual Studies: A Historiographical Review,” Images 3 (2010): 102-118.

“Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” Art History 32 (September 2009): 734-754.

“The Aesthetics of Publishing: The Art Book as Object from Print to Digital,” Visual Resources 24 (March 2008): 39-42.  (Co-author w/William Tronzo)

“Publishing Paradigms in Art History,” Art Journal, 65 (Winter 2006): 36-40.

“Art History and Its Publishers,” (as Convener and Editor of Roundtable Discussion) Art Journal, 65 (Winter 2006): 51-55.

“The Trouble with Painting, the Image (less) Text,” Journal of Visual Culture 4 (August 2005): 203-236.

“Jackson Pollock and Post-Ritual Performance: Memories Arrested in Space,” TDR (The Drama Review) 48 (Spring 2004): 60-78.

“Visual and Performance Studies: A New History of Interdisciplinarity,” Social Text 73 (Winter 2002): 29-46. (Co- author with Mark Franko)

“Teaching Jewish Studies: Projecting Culture, Jewish Historians and the History of Art,” Judaism 49 (Summer 2000): 352-357.

“Review Article: The Turn to Visual Culture,” Visual Anthropology Review, 12 (Spring 1996): 77-83.

“Leni Riefenstahl: The Power of the Image,” Discourse, 18 (Spring 1996): 20-44. (Co-author with Bill Nichols)

“The Question of ‘Native Style’ in Renaissance Art History,” Periskop (Journal of the Institute for Kunsthistorie, University of Copenhagen), 4 (1995): 101-118.

“The Early Modern Lives of the Artist in the Italian Context: The Literary and Historical Dimensions of a Myth,” in The Image of Technology (Selected Papers of the 1994 Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery), edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Pueblo: University of Southern Colorado, 1994), 160-165.

“Lives of Poets and Painters in the Renaissance,” Word & Image, 6 (April-June 1991): 154-162.

“Imitatio Buonarroti,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (Winter 1989): 582-602.

“Old Age and Old-Age Style in the Lives of Artists:  Gianlorenzo Bernini,” Art Journal, 46 (1987): 115-121.

“Two Statues by Gianlorenzo Bernini in Morristown, NJ,” Art Bulletin, 56 (1974): 551-554.

Chapters in Books (peer-reviewed)

“Embodiment in Performance Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Performance, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, New York: Routledge, commissioned.

“Turkish Shadow Puppets in Diaspora,” in Jewish Diaspora after 1945: A Study of Jews and Communities in the Middle East and North Africa, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021, forthcoming, 9480 words.

“Espejito, Espejitos: Hacia una Historia de la Forma en el Libro de los Pasajes de Walter Benjamin,” in Walter Benjamin aquí y ahora, edited by Maria Mercedes Andrade, Bogotá, Columbia: Universidad de los Andes, 2018, 11-27.

“A Proposition for Reenactment: Disco Angola by Stan Douglas,” in The Oxford Handbook of Danced Reenactment, edited by Mark Franko, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, 571-586.

“Ultimo Bagaglio par Hubert Damisch et Ken Lum: L’objet théoretique et la pensée en peinture,” in Hubert Damisch, l’art au travail, edited by Giovanni Careri and Georges Didi-Huberman, Paris: Editions Mimésis, 2016, 192-229.

“Deleuze on Foucault: The Recourse to Painting,” in Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21^st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, in the series: Global Aesthetic Research, London: Rowman and Littlefield International Ltd., 2016, 149-164.

“Introduction: Perspectives on Foucault and the Arts and Letters,” in Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21^st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, in the series: Global Aesthetic Research, London: Rowman and Littlefield International Ltd., 2016, xi-xviii.

“Pablo Picasso: Late Works and the Model-Muse,” in Picasso: The Artist and His Muses, London: Black Dog Press and Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016, 128-151.

“Michel Foucault’s Ironic Object,” in Proceedings of the 33rd Congress of the International Committee History of Art, Nuremberg: CIHA, 2014, 69-72.

“To Begin with the Scrim,” in Stan Douglas, edited by Léon Krempel, Munich, London and New York: Haus der Kunst and Prestel, 2014, 160-165.

“The Artist (Revised),” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2^nd Edition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, Vol. 1, 196-201.

“Historicism in Art History (Revised),” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2^nd Edition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, Vol. 3, 333-338.

“Fairness and the Visual Arts in Theory and Practice: The Case of Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” in Explorations of Fairness: Interdisciplinary Inquiries in Law, Science and the Humanities, edited by Janis P. Sarra, Toronto: Carswell, 2013, 155-169.

“Toward a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics: Theorizing the Turns,” in The Handbook of Visual Culture, edited by Ian Heywood, Barry Sandywell, Catherine Soussloff, et al. London: Berg, 2012, 90-101.

“The Vita of Leonardo da Vinci in the Du Fresne Edition of 1651,” in Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550-1900, edited by Claire Farago, London: Ashgate, 2009, 75-196.

“Image-Times, Image-Histories, Image-Thinking,” in Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, edited by Tyrus Miller, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008, 145-70.

“In the Name of the Artist,” in NAME: Ready made (Exhibition Catalogue), edited by Janez Janša, Janez Janša, and Janez Janša, Graz: Forum Städtpark Steirischer Herbst and Ljublijana: Moderna galerija Ljublijana, 2008, 1-22.

“The Trouble with Painting: Image (less) Text” (revised), in Editing the Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the Visual, edited by Mark Cheetham, Elizabeth Legge, and Catherine M. Soussloff, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, 67-92.

“Discourse/Figure/Love: The Location of Style in the Early Modern Sources on Leonardo da Vinci,” in Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, edited by Claire Farago, University of Manchester Press, 2008, 37-57.

“Post-colonial Torture: Rituals of Viewing at Abu Ghraib,” in Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Mark Franko, London: Routledge, 2007, 159-187.

“The Renaissance in Art History,” in Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, edited by Jonathan Woolfson, London: Palgrave, 2005, 141-55.

“Portraiture and Assimilation in Vienna: The Case of Hans Tietze,” in Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, edited by Howard Wettstein, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002, 113-149.

“Art Photography, History, and Aesthetics,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, edited by Elizabeth Mansfield, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, 295-313.

“Maya Deren Herself,” in Maya Deren: Radical Aspirations, edited by Bill Nichols, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001, 105-129.

“Like a Performance: Performativity and the Historicized Body from Bellori to Mapplethorpe,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, edited by Mark Franco and Annette Richards, Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 2000, 69-98.

“The Aura of Power and Mystery that Surrounds the Artist,” in Rückkehr des Autors.  Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs, edited by Fontis Jannis, Gerhard Lauer, Mathias Martinez, Simone Winko, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999, 481-493.

“Introducing Jewish Identity to Art History,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999, 1-16.

“The Artist,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Edited by Michael Kelly, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1998, Vol. 1: 130-35.

“Historicism in Art History,” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Edited by Michael Kelly, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1998, Vol. 2: 407-12.

Criticism and Curation

“Journey into Now: Luca del Baldo’s Portrait of Me as Selfie,” in Luca del Baldo, The Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality: Atlas of Iconic Turn (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), published Sept. 7, 2020, 2100 words.

“Three Takes on Cindy Sherman: Catherine M. Soussloff,” Canadianart, December 19, 2019, https://canadianart.ca/features/three-takes-on-cindy-sherman/

“Michael Morris: Hollywood Babylon,” Capilano Review 29 (2016), 2 pp.

Ben Gest: Photographs, Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2007.

Big and Bold: Prints from the Anderson Collection, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, August-Nov 2003 (co-curator).

“Aesthetics and Catastrophe,” in Collapsing Histories: Time, Space and Memory, Sesnon Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2003, n.p.

2000-01 and 1994-95  Film Reviews for KUSP National Public Radio (NPR), Santa Cruz, CA (written, recorded, and aired on radio two times per month)

John Ross Key: The Odyssey of an Artwork, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History April-July 2001 (co-curator).

“Nell Blaine: Essay from Interview,” in Virginia Women Artists: Female Experience in Art, Blacksburg, VA, 1984, 52-57.

“New Prints from Old Cracow,” in Printed in Cracow, William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT, 1984, 2-3.

Architectural Treatises from the Fowler Collection at Evergreen House (Exhibition Catalogue), The Johns Hopkins University, 1974. Co-author.