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

Science fiction films imagine futures that often comment on the failures of the present. In recent years, “clif-fi,” or science fiction about climate change, has become an increasingly popular sub-genre, and some historical films have been newly understood within this framework. This class will study a wide range of historical and contemporary cli-fi films, including international films, experimental films, and blockbusters, in order to understand how they encourage us to see the escalating crisis of climate change. Each week a film will be screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, George Miller, Australia); Snowpiercer (2013, Bong Joon-ho, South Korea); Neptun Frost (2021, Saul Williams, Rwanda); Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki, Japan) or The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich, USA), to name a few. Students will be expected to read essays before class, attend film screenings, participate in conversations and other tasks.

Class Number

2300

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

2315

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

A master's thesis is required for completion of the master's degree in arts administration. The thesis should demonstrate a student's ability to design, justify, execute, evaluate, and present the results of original research or of a substantial project. In this class students work closely with an MAAAP program advisor, and meet frequently with other MAAAP participants in groups and in individual meetings. The thesis is presented, in both written and oral form, to a thesis committee for both initial and final approval. You must be a Master of Arts in Arts Administration and Policy student to enroll in this course.

Class Number

2518

Credits

3