Eric Garberson

Eric Garberson’s teaching and research focus on nineteenth-century European art and intellectual history, with an active side interest in the intersection of art and visual culture with the history of sexuality and gender. While serving as department chair, he teaches an undergraduate lecture course on the history of photography. He also continues to advise MA Qualifying Papers.

He especially enjoys advising student work that engages his eclectic interests, ranging from representations of gender and sexuality by queer artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to more traditional art historical examinations of individual works and artists. A partial list of specific topics includes: representations of masculinity in the work of the American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker, depictions of the female nude by the French painter Suzanne Valadon, a series of photographs by the French photographer Nadar, how museums interpret gendered depictions of female rulers in ancient Egypt, and reception of African American quilting traditions by contemporary quilters.

His research examines the formation of art and architectural history as academic disciplines in the early nineteenth century, primarily in Germany with a focus on Berlin. It analyzes how institutional structures and intellectual frameworks worked together to define what these disciplines studied and the theories and methods they employed. His current book project explores these questions through an in-depth investigation of one of the very first art history survey texts, published in 1842, and its author, Franz Kugler (1808-1858). A primary goal of this project is to provide a better understanding of how the values and concerns of a few privileged individuals 200 years ago still inform what art historians do today.

Garberson earned a Ph.D and MA in the history of art from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in art history from Pomona College.