Catherine M. Soussloff

Known for her comparative and historical approaches to the central theoretical concerns of art history, visual culture and aesthetics, Catherine Soussloff’s recent publications have focused on: performance art, theories of the image from Leonardo da Vinci to contemporary art, concepts of the Baroque, Viennese art and culture in the early 20th century, Jewish studies and art history, and curatorial practice. She is the author of The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minnesota) and The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern (Duke). She has edited five collected volumes and published over forty essays and articles. She has lectured widely in three languages in Canada, the United States, South America and Europe.

As a Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Soussloff served as Director of the Visual and Performance Studies Research group, where faculty and graduate students from a wide range of fields researched and published collaboratively for fifteen years. She is presently completing the book, That Ironic Object of Desire: Michel Foucault and Painting, the first comprehensive study of Foucault's writings on painting. Professor Soussloff will be lecturing on this topic next year in Paris at the Sorbonne and at the Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art (INHA).

Professor Soussloff has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Getty Research Institute, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the College Art Association of America, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania and the Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In summer 2011 Soussloff was a resident at the University of California, Irvine where she held a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar fellowship for the study of Walter Benjamin’s Later Writings.