Margot Bouman

Margot Bouman is an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at The New School. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. Recent awards and fellowships include a GIDEST research fellowship, and a nomination for a Distinguished University Teaching Award (both 2017/18), as well as a 2016/17 Art Writing Workshop recipient (The Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program). She is at work on a manuscript about avant-garde television, from the 1940s to the 1980s. A recently completed essay that offers a new theorization of memes will appear in an upcoming Wiley-Blackwell reader in visual culture. She has a book under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing on sampling as a site-specific practice. A chapter in this book thinks through Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket (2016) to the longer representational history of Emmett Till, which Bouman anchors in contemporary art, the civil rights movement, Jim Crow and white shame. In addition to memes, sampling, avant-garde television and contemporary art, her research interests include the long, oppositional interrelationship between cultural and economic capital, and the work of the feminist/analytic philosopher Elizabeth Anderson on freedom and equality.