Allison Morehead
Professor
Department of Art History and Art Conservation
Research Areas
Modern art; critical theory, in particular feminist and critical race theory; art, science, and medicine; medical humanities; history of collecting and museums; visual and material culture studies
Biography
I study modern French, German, and Scandinavian art, visual, and material culture, emphasizing intersections with the psy-sciences and relays between modernism and the medicalization of life. In recent years, I have also worked in the field of the medical humanities. My first book Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form appeared in 2017, and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. Currently, I am curating an exhibition called Lifeblood/Livsblod - Edvard Munch at MUNCH in Oslo, 27 June to 21 September 2025. Lifeblood juxtaposes the work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch with visual and material cultures of medicine to explore the universal and particular experiences of having a vulnerable body in the age of modern medicine.
In 2021–23, I co-directed the event series Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities, which will soon be published as a co-edited volume (with Fiona Johnstone and Imogen Wiltshire), Art & and the Critical Medical Humanities with Bloomsbury Academic Press. This is part of a larger collaboration with the Visual and Material Lab of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK, funded by the Wellcome Trust. I am also the Principal Investigator of Curating Cultural Heritage for the Medical and Health Humanities, a Matariki Network project in partnership with Queen's, Durham, and Uppsala University in Sweden.
I have been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Whiting, Kress, Rhoades, and Brocher Foundations, King's College, Cambridge, the Social Science Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I currently serve as Editor-in-chief and Chair of the Editorial Board for caa.reviews.
Courses Taught
- ARTH 226 Modern Arts in a Globalizing World
- ARTH 288 Art Worlds
- ARTH 324 French Art and Its Reception, 1855–1912
- ARTH 311: Gender and Modernism
- ARTH 800: Methods for an Expanded Art History
- ARTH 864: Art and the Medicalization of Modern Life
Recent Publications
“Edvard Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life: Towards a Curatorial Medical Humanities,” Journal of Medical Humanities, Special Theme Issue: Medical Humanities in the Nordics, edited by Ylva Söderfeldt, Kristofer Hansson, Maja Bodin (4 September 2024): https://rdcu.be/dS1r9
"Sick Girls, Sick Women, Sick Prints," British Museum Research Publication, no. 237, Munch and His World: Graphic Arts and the Avant-garde in Paris and Berlin, edited by Giulia Bartrum (2022): 52–67
"A Natural History of August Strindberg's Surrealism," in The Savage Eye/I Villskapens Øye, edited by Lars Toft-Eriksen, 220–33. MUNCH, Oslo, 2022.
"Modernism and the Green Baize," nonsite.org, no. 27 (February 2019), special issue on the nineteenth century co-edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young.
"Hands, Dissection, and Embodied Seeing: Strindberg and Munch," in August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Image, Text, and Theatre, edited by Jonathan Schroeder, Anna Westerståhl Stenport, and Eszter Szalczer, 2018.
"The Untimely Face of Munch," in Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed (exh. cat. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Munch Museum), 2017.
Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2017).
"Des mains d'hommes célèbres et d'autres primates: Strindberg et Gauguin," in August Strindberg: De la mer au cosmos (exh. cat. Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne), 2016.
"Representation in the Age of Mediumistic Reproduction, from Symbolism to the Bauhaus," in The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art, edited by Michelle Facos and Thor J. Mednick, 2015 (with Elizabeth Otto).
"Defending Deformation: Maurice Denis’s Positivist Modernism," in Art History, 2015.
"Understanding and Translating: Gauguin and Strindberg in 1895," in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2014.
"Lithographic and Biological Error in Edvard Munch’s Women in the Hospital (1896)," in Print Quarterly, 2014.
"The Musée de la folie: Collecting and exhibiting chez les fous", in Journal of the History of Collections, 2011.
"Symbolism, Mediumship, and the 'Study of the Soul that has Constituted Itself as a Positivist Science'," in RACAR - Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 2009.
"‘Are there bacteria in the rooms of Monte Carlo?’: The Roulette Paintings, 1891–93," in Munch blir “Munch” / Munch becoming “Munch” (exh. cat. Munch Museum, Oslo), 2008.
"A Certain tour d’esprit: Édouard Vuillard’s Salon Lerolle," in Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France (exh. cat. The David and Alfred Smart Museum, University of Chicago), 2007.
