Nora Annesley Taylor

Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History (2007); BA, 1984, Brown University; MA, PhD, 1997, Cornell University. Books: Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art; ed., Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, An Anthology; ed., Le Vietnam au Feminin; ed., Studies in Southeast Asian Art History: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O'Connor. Articles: Art Journal, Arts Asiatiques, Third Text, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Ethnos, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crossroads, Flash Art, Asian Art News. Curation: Breathing is Free: 12,756.3, Recent Work by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba (2009); Changing Identity: Recent Work by Women Artists from Vietnam (2005–2009, travelling); Blue Memory: Tran Trong Vu (2004); Post-War Vietnamese Art: Paintings from the Collection of Bruce Blowitz/Albert Goodman (2016); John David Mooney Foundation, Chicago, 2016. Awards: John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2014–2015; Getty Collaborative Research Award, 2009; Fulbright Scholar; Asian Cultural Council; Rockefeller-Joiner Center.

Chair, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, 2018-2021; Elected Faculty Liaison, 2015-2018; Chair, Faculty Contract and Tenure Review Board, 2013; Director of the Graduate Program in Modern and Contemporary Art History, 2009–2012; SAIC Faculty of the Year, 2011.

• Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (University of Hawaii and National University of Singapore Press, 2004 and 2009)
• Co-editor (with Boreth Ly), Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, An Anthology (Cornell University Press, SEAP, 2012)
• Co-editor (with Gisèle Bousquet), Le Vietnam au Feminin (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005)
• Editor, Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O'Connor (Cornell University Press, SEAP, 2000)
• Recent Articles (can be downloaded from academia.edu)
• 2018 Co-editor with Karin Zitzewitz, “History as Figure of Thought in Contemporary Art in South and Southeast Asia,” Art Journal, Winter
• 2020 Forthcoming Co-editor with Lucy Davis and Kevin Chua, “Uncontainable Natures: Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Culture,” Antennae, Winter

Peer Reviewed

• 2022 with Natalia Kraevskaia, “Moscow’s Outreach to Hanoi: Artistic Ties Between the Soviet Union and Vietnam,” Art History, Vol. 45:5, November
• 2022 “Sedimented Acts: Performing History and Historicizing Performance in Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore,” Southeast of Now, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 13-31, March
• 2022 “The Spectacle of History: Nikhil Chopra at the Met,” Performing Arts Journal, 130 (2022) pp.79-88
• 2021 “Hunter-Gatherer or the Other Ethnographer? The Artist in the Age of Historical Reproduction” Journal of Material Studies, December
• 2019 “(Tran)scribed History: Phan Thao Nguyen’s Palimpsest Visions of Colonialism and Conversion” Afterall, Winter 2019, 72-83
• 2019 “Đổi Mới and the Globalization of Vietnamese Art,” co-authored with Pamela Nguyen Corey, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14, No. 1, 1-34, March
• 2018 “The Document as Event: Vietnamese Artists’ Engagements with History,” Art Journal, Winter
• 2016 “Re-Authoring Images of the Vietnam War: Dinh Q Lê’s ‘Light and Belief’ Installation at dOCUMENTA (13) and the Role of the Artist as Historian.” South East Asia Research 25, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 47–61

My research centers of contemporary art from Southeast Asia, in particular, Vietnam and Singapore. I lived for a total of nearly a decade in Vietnam and Singapore and have been traveling to Asia for over 30 years. I am interested in the art historiography of contemporary Asian art, performance art in Asia and artists' engagements with historical and archival material. Recently, I have been working closely with the Danish Vietnamese artist Danh Vo. I teach contemporary Asian art, Buddhist Art, Colonialism, Vietnam and India. I want students to learn from artists who challenge stereotypes and cultural assumptions of Asia in order to question biases toward artists outside of Euro-America.

• 2024 Samhita Sonti, “Looking at Zarina’s Work about Home, Displacement, and Longing Through a Queer Lens.”
• 2024 Paula Yahaira Lopez, “The Cultural is Poltical: Lukas Avendaño’s Interventions in Post-Revolutionary Imagery & Sites of Cultural Heritage.”
• 2023 Clayton Reed Kennedy, “Presence and Placement: Applications of Digital 3D Objects in Museums.”
• 2022 Celine Wang, “Tehching Hsieh: Autonomy and Surveillance in One Year Performances.”
• 2021 Aleksandra Matic, “Screaming Silence: Reconfigured Mythologies in the Photographs of Chitra Ganesh.”