Dr. Jennifer Chuong
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Jennifer Chuong is the Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Junior Fellow (on leave) at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In her research and teaching she uses critical making practices and the physical study of art to analyze art’s relationship to histories of race, science, and the environment. She is currently at work on a book project, “Surface Experiments: Art, Nature, and the Making of Early America,” which recovers the artistic, scientific, and philosophical fascination with surfaces as sites of physical transformation in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Through wide-ranging techniques like mezzotint engraving, paper marbling, veneer furniture, and oil painting, Americans explored the nature of material impermanence and imagined a new kind of society. A second research project analyzes the role of printmaking in materializing racial difference over the course of the long eighteenth century.
Selected Publications:
“Engraving’s ‘Immoveable Veil of Black’: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique.” The Art Bulletin (Forthcoming, June 2022).
“Contact, and Contact Again: Reflections on an Eighteenth-Century Powder Horn.” With Kailani Polzak. Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Forthcoming, Fall 2021).
“‘A Gloss Equal to Glass’: The Material Brilliance of Early American Furniture.” In In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th-Century British World, edited by Christopher Maxwell. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 2020.
Arindam Dutta, ed. [One of four associate editors.] A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment. Cambridge, MA: SA+P Press, Department of Architecture, MIT, 2013.
Selected Conferences and Panels Organized:
Imprinting Race, Clark Art Institute. Co-organized with Kailani Polzak [March 2022]
“The Colors of Race,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference. Co-organized with Oliver Wunsch (March 2018)
Selected Presentations:
Université de Paris, About Time: Temporality in American Art and Visual Culture, “The Unfaithful Surface: John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (November 2021)
The Huntington, Paper Ecologies in the Early Modern World, “Overmarbling and Paper’s Disorderly Metamorphoses” (November 2020)
CAA Annual Conference, “Composing Type, Throwing Pigments: The Revolutionary Potential of Marbling in Early America” (February 2020)
The Society for U.S. Intellectual History Annual Conference, “Tacit Protest: Revolution and Materiality” (November 2019)
Harvard University, History of the Book Seminar, “The Fluid Surface: Marbling and Overmarbling in Early America” (October 2019)
Yale University Art Gallery, Stories in American Glass: New Research, New Perspectives, Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque Memorial Symposium, “Witch Balls: A Study in Whimsey” (March 2019)
National Portrait Gallery, Greenberg Steinhauser Forum in American Portraiture, “Delineating the Shadows” (December 2018)
Southern Methodist University, Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture at 25, “Wood in Transition: Veneer Furniture in the Early American Republic” (November 2018)
CAA Annual Conference, “Engraving’s ‘Immovable Veil of Black’: Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait and the Politics of Technique” (February 2018)
American Philosophical Society, The Art of Revolutions, “Printerly Protest in Revolutionary America” (October 2017)
American Antiquarian Society, Good, Fast, Cheap: The Printed Word & Image in America Before 1900, “Fast and Slow Printing: Paper Marbling and Letterpress in Early America” (October 2017)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Fellows Lectures, “Banking on Surfaces: Benjamin Franklin’s Marbled Bills” (May 2017)
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Works in Progress Series, “‘That Immovable Veil of Black’: Engraving and Epidermal Expression in the Eighteenth Century” (March 2017)
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Early American Material Texts, “The Nature of Marbled Surfaces in Early America” (May 2016)
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Placing Prints: New Developments in the Study of Early Modern Print, “Engraving’s Paradoxical Grounds: Print and Colonial Settlement in Eighteenth-Century British America” (February 2016)
Massachusetts Historical Society, Brown Bag Lunch Program, “‘Chargeable Ground’ and ‘Shaking Meadows’: New Models of Land Cultivation in Eighteenth-Century New England” (January 2016)