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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. She is currently completing a book based on her doctoral
dissertation titled Doctor Photo: Portrait Photography as Medicine in American
Culture. This interdisciplinary project 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 in nineteenth-century America. 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 Dartmouth College’s
Leslie Humanities Center in the fall of 2007, Professor Sheehan began work 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 satirical photographs and periodicals, studio advertisements,
 illustrated magazines, and commercial trade cards 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 advertisements 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 art 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, American Visual Humor, and American Art and Science.
Recent Publications
“Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography
in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Angela Rosenthal and David Bindman,
eds., No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and
Ethnicity (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
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).
Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship,
Society for the History of Technology (2004-2005)
Research Travel Grant, Chemical Heritage Foundation (2003)
Wood Fellowship, Wood
Institute for the History of Medicine, College of Physicians of Philadelphia (2003).
Recent Lectures and Conference Participation
Chair, Visual
Culture/Art History Caucus Program Committee, 2008 Annual
Meeting of the American Studies Association.
“‘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)
“What a ‘Doctor of Photography’ Can Do: Photographic Retouching
and Social Remaking in Late-Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” 2006
Historical Society of Pennsylvania Symposium, “Extreme Makeovers: Histories
of Self-Fashioning in the Mid-Atlantic” (November 2006)
“The Photographic Portrait Studio as Medical Space in Nineteenth-Century
America,” in “Comparative Methodologies in Nineteenth-Century
Visual Culture,” 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association
(November 2005)
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