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Dr Stephanie Schwartz

19th and 20th Century Photography and Photographic Theory, American Visual Culture, Postcolonial Theory and Geography, Contemporary Cuban Art, Media Theory Email: stephanie.schwartz@ucl.ac.uk

Stephanie Schwartz teaches American Art, with a focus on the history of photography and visual technologies. Before joining the faculty at UCL, Stephanie was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History and Theory of Photography at Bryn Mawr College (2007-2009) and the Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art. (2009-2010). She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007.

Stephanie is currently completing Cuba Per Diem: Walker Evans and American Photographs, a book-length study of Walker Evans’s 1933 Cuba portfolio. Offering the first comprehensive study of Evans’s work in Cuba, the book situates the development of photographic modernism at the center of the politics of Cuba’s Americanization. A historical study redressing the absence of critical thinking about the relationship between modernist photography and imperialism, Cuba Per Diem also finds footing in contemporary geopolitics. Evans’s photographs serve to historicize current debates about how—after a hiatus of forty-eight years—to finally Americanize Cuba. Her research on Walker Evans has developed into a related study of on documentary film and the work of Paul Strand.

Stephanie’s interest in media and politics frames her second research project, a study of contemporary Cuban art and media. This project investigates the resurgence of documentary practices in Cuba following the political and social upheavals of the 1990s. In particular, she is interested in exploring the ways in which contemporary Cuban artists address the role mass media played in the organization of the Revolution of 1959.

Recent Publications:

'Paul Strand's Living Labor,' ARTMargins, forthcoming

'Inadequate Histories,' a review of Steve Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, Art Jounal , forthcoming

"Tania Bruguera: Between Histories,' Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 2 (June 2012): 215-232.

'Documentary's Future Past: A Conversation with Jorge Ribalta,' Photoworks 18 (May 2012): 50-57.

'Chronicles: A Conversation with Manuel Piña,' Third Text 110 (May 2011): 361-383.

'Beyond Looking,' a review of Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, edited by Sandra Phillips and Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society, Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 3 (November 2010): 389-92.

'Pictures, Again,' a review of Words without Pictures, edited by Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein, Art Journal 68, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 87-9.

Conferences

"Retracing America: Modernism After Paul Strand," co-organized with Barnaby Haran with generous support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, UCL, March 8-9, 2013. For more information, please visit Retracing America or www.retracingamerica.co.uk

Publications

A list of publications is available from UCL's Institutional Research Information Service via the Iris link below.

• Iris Profile