Sarah Burns | Faculty
Ruth N. Halls Professor, Department of History of Art
E-mail: burnss@indiana.edu
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Education
Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1979
M. A., University of California, Davis, 1975
B. A., University of Chicago, 1968
Research Interests
- Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art
- History of Photography
- American Architecture
- Social history, popular culture, consumer culture and gender studies.
- Current project: Co-editor, with John Davis, "American Art of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Documentary Anthology."
Courses Recently Taught
- American Gothic (A153, Stanford University)
- Goddesses, Freaks, and He-Men: The Body in Visual Culture (COAS Topics course E103)
- Ideas and Human Experience (Honors Division H102)
- Nineteenth-Century Art (A341, with Honors section 1985)
- Twentieth-Century Art (A342, with Honors section 1988)
- American Art to 1913 (A345)
- Art in Europe, 1900-1924 (A442)
- American Art to 1860 (A445)
- American Art 1860-1900: The Gilded Age (A446)
- History of American Architecture (A348/548)
- History of Photography (A450/550)
- Introduction to American Studies (G603); Colloquium in American Studies (G620)
- Seminar, Problems in American Art (A643), on the following topics: "American Illustration" (Spring, 1980), "Taste in America," 1865-1900 (Fall, 1982; cross-listed as G751, American Studies Seminar), "American Art and Society 1880-1920" (cross-listed as G751), "Reading and Writing the New American Art History" (Fall, 1990, cross-listed as G751) , and "Realism in American Art and Culture" (Fall, 1992, cross-listed as G751); "Society, the Media, and the Artist in America" (Spring, 1995); "Art and the Social Body" (Fall 1996), "Winslow Homer" (Stanford 1998, IUB 2000); “American Gothic” (Fall 2001); “Orientalism” (Fall 2002), “Popular Art: Class Taste, and Cultural Politics, 1830-1930” (Fall 2004); “A la mode: Visual and material Cultures of the Body” (Fall 2005), "Fun, Fantasy, and Foreign Bodies: Anatomizing the Visual Cultures of American Humor" (Fall 2007)
Selected Publications
- Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Temple, 1989)
- Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (Yale, 1996)
- Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (California, 2004)
Honors and Awards
- Victorian Society in America Metropolitan Chapter (New York) Exhibition/Catalogue award for Off the Pedestal: New Women in the Art of Homer, Chase, and Sargent (Newark Museum, 2005), and Frederic Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape (Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 2006)
- Charles Rufus Morey Award (College Art Association) for Painting the Dark Side, 2005
- Millard Meiss Publication Grant (College Art Association) in support of Painting the Dark Side, 2003
- Ruth N. Halls Professorship, Indiana University, 1999
- Senior Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center, 1999-2000
- Winner of Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in the field of American Art, 1998. Awarded for Inventing the Modern Artist
- Pastoral Inventions: selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1989
- 1989: NEH Publication Subvention for Pastoral Inventions
- 1980, 1985, 1989, 1993: Indiana University Summer Faculty Fellowship
