Kenneth Haltman | University of Oklahoma (original) (raw)

Kenneth Haltman, H. Russell Pitman Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma, received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, and Translation (Phi Beta Kappa with Highest University Honors) and his Ph.D. from Yale in American Studies with a concentration in Art History. Before coming to OU he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of American art and material culture at Bryn Mawr, Emory, the University of Memphis, and Michigan State.

His academic honors include Fulbright-Hayes, Andrew W. Mellon, and Henry C. Luce Foundation fellowships; research awards from Winterthur, the Huntington Library, the National Museum of American Art, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities; Senior Research fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library; a Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship in the History of American Art at Freie Universität-Berlin; the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis; a Distinguished Visiting Lectureship at the University of Western Australia; and a US-UK Fulbright Scholars Award at the University of York.

In addition to critical translations of major works (Earth and Reveries of Will, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire) by Gaston Bachelard and scholarly essays on the history of pictorial representation in the United States, his publications include American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, co-edited with Jules David Prown (Michigan State University Press, 2000), Looking Close and Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823 (Penn State University Press, 2008), Butterflies of North America: Titian Peale’s Lost Manuscript (Abrams, with the American Museum of Natural History, 2015), a critical edition and translation of René Brimo's The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting, originally published in Paris in 1938 (Penn State University Press, 2016), and Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting in Australia and the United States, co-edited with Richard Read (Terra Foundation, 2020). He is currently completing Artists and Hunters: Figures of Predatory Looking in Nineteenth-Century American Art, a collection of essays, and a critical translation of Jean Lancri, Duchamp et le fantôme de Marcel: Trois essais sur la part de l’ombre dans Étant donnés (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021).

Other recent publications include “The Pictorial Legacy of Lewis and Clark” in Knowing Nature: Philadelphia and the Visual Culture of Natural History, 1740 to 1840 (Yale University Press, 2011); “Picturesque Nostalgia as Ironic Dislocation: Joshua Shaw’s Unsettling Visions of the Old New World,” Art History (September 2011), reprinted in Anglo-American: Art between England and America, 1770-1970 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); “Flight and Predation: The Anti-Documentary Poetics of Alfred Jacob Miller,” American Art (Spring 2014); "Awakened Dream: Images of Reading and Beholding in the Work of Daniel Huntington and His Contemporaries," in For America: The Art of the National Academy (Yale University Press, 2019); “The Art of Indian Affairs: Earth and Sky in Charles Bird King’s Keokuk, the Watchful Fox,” in Inventing Destiny: Cultural Explorations of US Expansion (University of Kansas Press, 2019); “Predatory Vision in a Modernist Vein: William Michael Harnett’s After the Hunt,” a featured "Intersection" essay in Reflections: The American Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio University Press, 2019); both the co-authored Introduction regarding the role of the Anthropocene in Australian and American art and “Predatory Looking in Antebellum American and Early Australian Landscape” in Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between (Terra Foundation, 2020); and “Cartographic Representation in the Age of Vernacular Landscape: Pictorial Metaphor in Stephen Long’s Map of the Country Drained by the Mississippi,” in Cartographic Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Americas (Routledge, 2021).

For all these publications, see below.

His teaching at OU has included introductory and advanced courses in American Art History and the Art of the American West, Undergraduate Methods, Graduate Methods, and a suite of rotating seminars in Visual Analysis, Material Cultural, and Critical Issues in Recent Art History at the core of the graduate curriculum. He developed and, beginning in Fall 2015, has been supervising as Instructor of Record the department’s innovative team-taught thematic Introduction to Art History thanks to a Faculty Fellows Award from OU’s Center for Teaching Excellence with additional funding through the OU Libraries’ Open Educational Resources initiative.

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