Emily Braun Distinguished Professor of Art History
Braun has published in a wide range of fields, from late nineteenth century through contemporary European and American art. She received her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 1991. Her most recent research, published for exhibition catalogue essays, documents the influence of Darwin’s evolutionary biology on the ornamental style of Gustav Klimt and the relationship between the French Situationists and the Arte Povera artist Mario Merz. Her scholarship is inter-disciplinary and includes books and exhibitions on Fascist culture, Jewish history, and women’s studies. Braun’s over-arching interest is the influence of political ideologies on visual representation. Her studies of modern Italian art have opened up the history of the avant-garde to previously neglected or buried pasts, altering the received history of modernism and its legacy. Several of her essays have also analyzed the construction of gender and otherness in belles-lettres art criticism.
Braun’s lectures and seminars at Hunter College and the Graduate Center reflect these diverse interests: Themes from the fin-de-siècle (Symbolism); Modernism and Post-Modernism; Cubism; Futurism; Picasso; de Chirico; Art and Totalitarianism; The Modern Tradition of Portraiture; Theory of the Avant-garde; Art and Commodity. Braun emphasizes writing skills among her students and M.A. theses candidates and frequently teaches the foundational Research Methods course. She also organizes seminars around her curatorial and research projects and is currently at work on a cultural history of immediate post-World War II Europe.
Braun is the author of Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and co-author of The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons (Yale University Press, 2005) and Thomas Hart Benton: The America Today Murals (Williams College Museum of Art, 1985). She has edited the volumes De Chirico and America (Allemandi, 1996) and Italian Art in the 20th Century (The Royal Academy/ Prestel, 1989). Her essays and reviews have been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Modernism/modernity, Journal of Contemporary History, Art in America, Art Journal, and Arts Magazine. Braun has written for numerous museums including Tate Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, the National Gallery of Art, Canada; the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; the Palazzo Reale, Milan; the Musée d’arte moderne de la ville de Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Guggenheim Museum, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Neue Galerie, and the Jewish Museum in New York.
Braun was appointed a Fellow of the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2002-2003. She has been the recipient of a Senior Research Grant from the Getty Foundation (1993), and the Hunter College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2001). She has twice received the annual Henry Allen Moe Prize from the New York State Historical Association for the best art catalogue: as a contributing author to Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting (1982) and co-author of Gardens and Ghettos (1990). The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons won a National Jewish Book Award for 2005.
