Willamette University

Art History

Abigail Susik
  • Abigail Susik
  • Assistant Professor of Art History; Women's & Gender Studies Faculty
  • 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, Professor 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. A second book project, Screen Politics: A Culture of Projection (in progress), deals with the evolution of projection practices as a result of changing technology and the ethics of a rising projection culture in both contemporary art and advertising.

In 2011 Professor Susik co-curated the FIGMENT arts festival in Jackson, Mississippi with 40 participating artists. She was a guest speaker at the "Surrealist Collections" conference at Georgetown University in October. She also organized and participated in panels on the topics of “Time Polemics” and "Sense Perception" in Dada at the 2011 Modernist Studies Association and the 2012 Modern Language Association annual conferences.

Selected Awards

  • Atkinson Faculty Development Award, Research in Europe, Willamette University, 2011-2012
  • Millsaps College Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2009-2011
  • Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Fellowship, Columbia University, 2005-2006                
  • Columbia University Presidential Fellowship, 2000-2005

Selected Recent and Forthcoming Publications

“Consuming and Consumed: Fin de Siècle Images of Women and Addiction,” forthcoming chapter, Decadence, Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), eds. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen. Print.

"André Breton's Textual Collection: Nadja," forthcoming in Dada/Surrealism (University of Iowa), special issue on 'Dada/Surrealist exhibits,' eds. Pierre Taminiaux and Kathryn Floyd, spring 2013. Web.

“A New Type of Prototype: Art and Arduino Technology,” forthcoming chapter, Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture (Leuven University Press, 2012), ed. Carla Taban. Print.

“Jules Verne, Surrealism and Science Fiction,” forthcoming chapter for (Title TBA) (Penn UP), ed. Gavin Parkinson. Print.

 “The Screen Politics of Architectural Projection,” forthcoming in Public: Art, Culture, Ideas (York University, Canada), vol. 45, “Art and Civic Spectacle,” spring 2012. Web and print.

“Sky Projectors, Portapaks and Projection Bombing: the Rise of a Portable Projection Medium,” forthcoming in Journal of Film and Video (University of Illinois), special double issue on video history, ed. Elizabeth Coffman, vol. 64, spring 2012. Web and Print.

“Convergence Zone: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in Contemporary Art and Photography, Drain Magazine, vol. 15, “Supernature,” April 2012. Web.

 “Remarks on the Commodity Status and Critical Applications of the Surrealist Outmoded" in The Great Divide? High and Low Culture in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, vol. 2 (Degruyter, 2011). Print.

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

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