Pamela M. Lee

Biography

Pamela M. Lee is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts. Her area is the history, theory and criticism of late modernism and contemporary art with interests in the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Her courses include seminars on Abstract Expressionism; the art of the 1960s; contemporary art and globalization; feminism; methods and historiography; art and technology; and modernism and war. With Professor Fred Turner (Communication) she co-teaches graduate seminars on "Media Cultures of the Cold War," and "Media Technology Theory." Professor Lee has published four single-authored books in addition to journal articles, reviews and catalogue essays. Three books have appeared with the MIT Press, including Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (2000); Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004); and Forgetting the Art World ( 2012) Another book, New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art, was published by Routledge in 2012. A French language edition of Object to be Destroyed will be published by Editions Macula, Paris; a Spanish language edition of Chronophobia will be released by El Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporáneo (CENDEAC), Murcia, Spain. Among other journals, her writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Assemblage, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Les Cahiers du Musee national d'arte moderne, Grey Roomand Texte zur Kunst. Lee is currently at work on Think Tank Aesthetics: Mid-Century Modernism, The Cold War and the Rise of Visual Cultue. The book considers how the interdisciplinary, cybernetic and systems-based interests of think tanks such as the RAND Corporation sponsored new approaches to the study of art and visual culture.

Research Interest

Contemporary Art, Modern Art