A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Shawn Smith wears a grey blazer with a black turtleneck layered underneath, red eye glasses and silver earrings. Her arms are folded across her chest and she is smiling at the camera.

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Shawn Smith

Professor and Chair of Visual & Critical Studies

Contact

Bio

Shawn Michelle Smith studies the history and theory of photography and race and gender in visual culture. She has published seven books, including most recently Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography (Duke 2020), which won the 2021 Ray and Pat Browne Award from the Popular Culture Association. 

Her other books are At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Duke 2013), which won the 2014 Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians and the 2014 Jean Goldman Book Prize from SAIC, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke 2004), and American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton 1999). She co-edited with Sharon Sliwinski Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke 2017), co-edited with Maurice O. Wallace Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Duke 2012), and co-authored with Dora Apel Lynching Photographs (California 2007). She guest edited a special issue of the journal MELUS on visual culture and race (2014), and she currently serves on the editorial or advisory boards of American Art, Photography & Culture, and Journal of Visual Culture. She has published essays in a number of edited collections and articles in American Quarterly, Art Journal, Aperture, Journal of Visual Culture, American Art, ASAP/J, African American Review, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Yale Journal of Criticism, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, among others. 

In 2018 she curated the exhibition Meridel Rubenstein: Eden Turned on Its Side at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. She has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. Smith is also a visual artist and her photo-based work has been exhibited in art galleries and university museums across the country.

Thesis Advisees

Antonia Piedmonte-Lang (2021), “Sites of Adjacency: Thinking and Feeling Jacob Holdt's ‘American Pictures’”

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course is about writing at the crossroads of cultural criticism, creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction and poetry. It is designed for visual scholars looking to expand their mode of critique and for creative writers interested in cultural criticism. The seminar is conducted largely as a writing critique workshop, and much of the time in class is spent discussing student work in progress. At different points throughout the semester we also discuss the writing strategies of diverse contemporary authors.

Readings for the course vary, but have included texts by authors such as Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, T Fleischmann, Kate Zambreno, Kathleen Stewart, Carol Mavor, Saidiya Hartman, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

Students in the class will present work in progress in a writing workshop twice, help to lead the discussion of an assigned reading once, give formal commentary on student work twice, and complete a polished piece of writing for the end of the semester.

Class Number

2315

Credits

3

Description

In the introduction to Burning with Desire, Geoffrey Batchen suggests that the study of photography has been largely divided by two opposing points of view, one that is interested in the essential, formal characteristics of photography and another that considers photography, and photographic meaning, to be determined by cultural context. Starting with this general rubric, we examine how that divide is addressed, reinforced, reconfigured and dismantled in recent studies of photography. Readings range from the pre-history of photography to digital imaging. We discuss works by cultural historians and art historians, and consider both popular and professional photographic practices. Texts will include books by Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Mavor, Robin Kelsey, Blake Stimson, and Christopher Pinney, among others. Class assignments include rigorous weekly discussions of the readings, two turns at leading class discussions, a final presentation based on the final project for the course, and a final project that may be written (15 pages) or studio-based.

Class Number

2223

Credits

3

Description

This course is about writing at the crossroads of cultural criticism, creative nonfiction, memoir, fiction and poetry. It is designed for visual scholars looking to expand their mode of critique and for creative writers interested in cultural criticism. The seminar is conducted largely as a writing critique workshop, and much of the time in class is spent discussing student work in progress. At different points throughout the semester we also discuss the writing strategies of diverse contemporary authors.

Readings for the course vary, but have included texts by authors such as Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, T Fleischmann, Kate Zambreno, Kathleen Stewart, Carol Mavor, Saidiya Hartman, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

Students in the class will present work in progress in a writing workshop twice, help to lead the discussion of an assigned reading once, give formal commentary on student work twice, and complete a polished piece of writing for the end of the semester.

Class Number

1034

Credits

3

Description

In the introduction to Burning with Desire, Geoffrey Batchen suggests that the study of photography has been largely divided by two opposing points of view, one that is interested in the essential, formal characteristics of photography and another that considers photography, and photographic meaning, to be determined by cultural context. Starting with this general rubric, we examine how that divide is addressed, reinforced, reconfigured and dismantled in recent studies of photography. Readings range from the pre-history of photography to digital imaging. We discuss works by cultural historians and art historians, and consider both popular and professional photographic practices. Texts will include books by Geoffrey Batchen, Carol Mavor, Robin Kelsey, Blake Stimson, and Christopher Pinney, among others. Class assignments include rigorous weekly discussions of the readings, two turns at leading class discussions, a final presentation based on the final project for the course, and a final project that may be written (15 pages) or studio-based.

Class Number

2205

Credits

3