Willamette University

Art History

Abigail Susik
  • Abigail Susik
  • Assistant Professor of Art History; On sabbatical (Spring 2014)
  • Modern and Contemporary Art History
  • Art Building 205
  • 503-370-6124

Abigail Susik

Education

  • B.A., Barnard College, Columbia University
  • M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Research and Teaching

Professor Susik's area of expertise is Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory, with a research focus on issues of culture and aesthetics in the European avant-gardes between the World Wars. After a decade of teaching experience in New York City and elsewhere, Dr. Susik offers courses at Willamette University related to nineteenth- through twenty-first-century Art History, The History of Photography, Methodologies of Art History, and specialized topics in Modern and Contemporary Art.

Her interdisciplinary work traces metahistorical shifts and transference across material, textual and visual cultures in European and American contexts in between the 19th and 21st centuries. A current book project, The Vertigo of the Modern: Surrealism and the Outmoded (in progress) examines the modern condition of obsolescence as it appears in three surrealist image-books from the 1920s and 1930s.

Selected Awards

  • Mellon-funded Liberal Arts Research Collaborative (LARC), “Remediation,” Willamette
    University, 2013
  • Atkinson Faculty Development Award, Research in Europe, Willamette University, 2011-2012
  • Millsaps College Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2009-2011

Selected Recent and Forthcoming Publications

“Dream Apprenticeship: Carrington and Jodorowsky in Mexico City,” forthcoming in Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde, eds. Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

“Consuming and Consumed: Woman as Habituée  in Eugène Grasset’s Morphinomaniac (1897),” forthcoming in Decadence, Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, eds. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

“Considerations on the Meta-Image and the Microcontroller in New Media Art,” forthcoming in Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture, ed. Carla Taban (Leuven University Press, 2014).

“Surrealism and Jules Verne: Navigating Context, Intertext and Subtext for a Collage by Max Ernst,” forthcoming in the book (Title TBA), ed. Gavin Parkinson (Penn UP, 2014).

Rothko, Mark,” forthcoming entry on the website Oregon Encyclopedia, 2013.

“Documenta 13, Kassel,” Journal of Curatorial Studies (Canada), vol. 2, no. 1, spring 2013. 111-116.

“2012 Mapping Festival, Geneva,” The Senses & Society (Canada), vol. 7, no. 3, spring 2013. 117-121.

“The Screen Politics of Architectural Projection,” Public: Art, Culture, Ideas (York University, Canada), vol. 45, “Civic Spectacle,” spring 2012. 106-119.             

“Sky Projectors, Portapaks and Projection Bombing: the Rise of a Portable Projection Medium,” Journal of Film and Video (University of Illinois), special double issue on video history, vol. 64, nos. 1-2, spring/summer, 2012. 79-92.

“Convergence Zone: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in Contemporary Art and Photography,” feature essay in Drain Magazine, vol. 15, “Supernature,” spring 2012. N.p.

“Between the Old and the New: The Surrealist Outmoded as a Radical Third Term,” in The Great Divide? High and Low Culture in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, vol. 2 (De Gruyter, 2011). 323-339.

“‘The Man of these Infinite Possibilities’: Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages,” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture (University of Pittsburgh), vol. 1, summer 2011. 62-87.

“Cy Twombly: Writing after Writing,” Rebus: A Journal of Theory and Art History (University of Essex, England), no. 3, winter 2009. 1-28.