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Home > Faculty > Full-time Faculty > Tanya Sheehan Assistant Professor American Art and Visual Culture Ph.D., Brown University Biographical Information: Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2008, Professor Sheehan received her Ph.D. from Brown University and went on to hold a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University. Her forthcoming book, “Doctor Photo: The Medicine of Photography in American Culture” (The Pennsylvania State University Press) examines the medical models and metaphors that defined the space of the urban photographic portrait studio, the materials central to photographic practices, as well as the physical and social effects of studio operations. Through a series of historical case studies, “Doctor Photo” shows how American photographers appropriated medical discourse in an effort to strengthen their professional legitimacy at a time when it was not well established. What was at stake in this effort, however, far exceeded the establishment of photography as one respected profession among many. Representations of photography as medicine, the book argues, shaped the institutional, epistemological, and social character of early portrait photography by defining photographers’ field of operations as the physical and social health of the white middle class. While in residence at the Beinecke Library and the American Antiquarian Society this spring, Professor Sheehan will be working on a second book which investigates popular humor about American photography and racial identity from the Civil War period to the Progressive era. The objects of this study are comic photographs, studio advertisements, illustrated periodicals, satirical literature, commercial trade cards, and early films in which humorists relied upon photographic processes to both express and assuage widespread fears about the instability of racial categories at this time. While many observed that America’s black population would all too readily embrace the racial reversals enabled by the photographic “negative,” for instance, others depicted “negroes” and white women darkening their faces with photographic chemicals to illustrate anxieties concerning the cosmetic character of blackness. In her analyses of these racial jokes, Professor Sheehan’s goal is to develop a model for taking photographic humor seriously as entertainment for white middle-class Americans and as highly complex social commentary. Professor Sheehan’s interdisciplinary research has significantly shaped her teaching interests and practices. Her survey courses include explorations of American visual culture, art and medicine, African-American art, and the black image in the West, all of which encourage students’ critical awareness of the particular values, possibilities, and limitations associated with different ways of producing and interpreting images. Along with these methodological reflections comes an engagement with a broad range of visual forms and media -- from popular prints and early film to high-status paintings -- and an investigation of their roles in the (re)production of gendered, raced, classed, and national identities. Professor Sheehan has designed her seminars as case studies that explore the relationships between images and social history, identity politics, and a variety of cultural practices in modern America. Recent topics include Race and Representation: America in Black and White and American Visual Humor. Professor Sheehan is an active member of the American Studies Association, having served as the Programming Chair of the Visual Culture Caucus since 2008, as well as Photography Field Editor for the online publication, caa.reviews. She also recently co-founded “The Developing Room: Photography Working Group” at the Center for Cultural Analysis, which promotes interdisciplinary dialogue among members of the Rutgers community whose research and/or teaching engages with the histories, theories, and practices of photography. Recent Publications “Doctor Photo: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America” (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming) “Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Early Photography,” in No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity, edited by Angela Rosenthal and David Bindman (forthcoming) A Declaration of Independence: 50 Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, exhibition catalogue published by the Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers University, forthcoming “Seeing through Race,” review of Martin A. Berger, “Sight Unseen: Whiteness in American Visual Culture,” Art History 30, no. 5 (November 2007): 764-769 Review of Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century,”Caareviews (September 6, 2007) “The Critical Eye: Reading Commercial Photography,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2006): 1199-1206 “African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection” (exhibition review), Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (December 2006): 815-819 Recent Grants and Fellowships American Antiquarian Society/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2009-2010) Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (2009-2010) Faculty Fellowship, Center for Cultural Analysis, “New Media Literacies: Gutenberg to Google,” Rutgers University (2008-2009) Residential Research Fellowship, Leslie Humanities Center Institute, “No Laughing Matter:Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality and Ethnicity,” Dartmouth College (2007). William H. Helfand Visiting Research Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania (2006-2007). Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University (2005-2007). Recent Lectures and Conference Participation “How to Laugh in “Post-Racial” America: Barack Obama in Political Cartoons,” in “Black Man, White Man, Commander-in-Chief: Barack Obama in Popular Visual Culture,” 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (November 2009) “Smiles, tears… indelibly recorded”: The politics of emotion in the photographic studio of C. H. Gallup & Co.,” in Feeling Photography: 2009 Toronto Photography Seminar Conference (October 2009) “‘Photography under a Cloud’: Race and Early Photographic Humor,” Philadelphia Seminar in American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art (March 2009) “Photo Doctors and Pixel Surgeons: The Medicine of Photography in the Digital Age,” in “Science and Aesthetics: Models and Metaphors,” 2009 College Art Association Conference (February 2009) “‘Oh! Dat Water Melon”: Racist Caricature and the Origins of the Photographic Smile,” in “No Laughing Matter: Race and American Visual Humor,” 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (October 2008) “Seeing in Black and White: Race and Photography in American Culture,” Center for Race and Ethnicity, Rutgers University (February 2008) “‘Panes Curing Pains’: Light, Medicine, and the Photographic Portrait Studio in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Studies Seminar, Columbia University (March 2007) Session Chair, “Seeing in Color: Visual Culture and Racial Politics in Philadelphia,” 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (October 2007) “Photography’s Blacks and Whites: Racial Humor in Nineteenth-Century Photographic Discourse,” in “What’s So Funny? Senses of Humor in Nineteenth-Century American Visual Culture,” 2007 College Art Association Conference (February 2007)

Contact:
    Phone: 732-932-0122 Ext. 20
    Email Dr. Sheehan

Office Hours:

Thursdays 1:00pm-2:30pm By Appointment

Research Interests:

·	-- Interactions between American photography and medicine, 1840 to the present -- American photographic history, historiography, and theory -- race and American visual culture -- American visual humor -- modern art, science, and technology

Undergraduate Classes Taught:

·	Race and Representation: America in Black and White (Spring 2008)
·	American Visual Humor (fall 2008)
·	The Art of the Body: Visual Culture and Medicine (fall 2009)
·	American Art, 1776-1913 (spring 2009)

Graduate Classes Taught:

·	Race and Visual Theory (Fall 2010)

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