Professor Erin Pauwels

Erin Pauwels is an historian of modern and contemporary art in the Americas with special interest in photography, Indigenous Studies, and ecocritical approaches to visual culture. Her research explores the politics of portraiture and placemaking, technologies of image dissemination, and intersections between theater and the visual arts.

Her first book, Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York was published by the Penn State University Press in 2024. It reconstructs the lost legacy of a once-famous nineteenth-century artist to reveal how the emergence of mass media reshaped definitions of artistic authorship along with the global reach and material character of art objects.

Other recent publications include essays on photography as a site of Native resistance; the hybrid media operations of painted studio backdrops; and the ambiguous potency of photographic truth claims in the context of digital and social media. Her published work appears in the journals American Art, Panorama, History & Technology, as well as edited volumes such as Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism (Routledge, 2024), The Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1800-1950 (Routledge, 2025), and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020).

Pauwels’s research has earned support from prominent funding institutions including the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Houghton Library of Harvard University, Harry Ransom Center, Huntington Library, American Antiquarian Society and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. Pauwels is a proud member of the Association of Historians of American Art, the Photography Network, and recently was elected to the Print Council of America.

In the 2024-25 academic year, Professor Pauwels will teach an undergraduate survey course at Oxford on American art from the 17th century to the present day. She will offer as well a Master’s course on art and environmental thought that focuses on how land, animals and material resources have inspired the art and, more broadly, the visual and material culture of the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

During her time in Oxford, Professor Pauwels will also be a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, where she will deliver the annual Terra Lectures in American Art in the Spring of 2025. The lectures will be open to staff and students at Oxford, as well as to the wider public.

Selected Works

• Pauwels, E. (2025) “Backdrops as Middle Ground: Photographic Portraiture and the Sites of Native Resistance,” The Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices,1800-1950. in Emily C. Burns and Alice M.R. Price (eds.), New York: Routledge.
• Pauwels, E. (2024). “From Inauguration Crowds to Capitol Mobs: Photography and Fact in the Post-Truth Era,” in G. Hamming and N. Phillips (eds.), Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism, eds. New York: Routledge.
• Pauwels, E. (2024). Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.
• Pauwels, E. (2024). “From Inauguration Crowds to Capitol Mobs: Photography and Fact in the Post-Truth Era,” in G. Hamming and N. Phillips (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1800-1950. New York: Routledge.
• Pauwels, E. (2024). “Network Artistry and Viral Reproduction in Antebellum Sheet Music Illustration,” in T. Leininger-Miller and K. Hartvigsen (eds.), A Century of US Illustrated Sheet Music, 1830-1930. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
• Pauwels, E. (2020). José María Mora and the Migrant Surround in American Portrait Photography. Panorama: Journal of the Historians of American Art 6(2).
• Pauwels, E. (2020). The Art of Not Posing: Napoleon Sarony and the Popularization of Pictorial Photography. In John Rohrbach (Ed.), Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of American Photography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Pauwels, E. (2018a). Let Me Take Your Head: Photographic Portraiture and the Gilded Age Celebrity Image. In W. W. Reaves (ed.), Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture (pp. 136–155). London, UK: The Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery in association with D Giles Limited.
• Pauwels, E. (2018b). Backdrop of East Lynne: Charles Demuth’s Dramatic Abstraction. American Art 32(3), 86–95.
• Pauwels, E. (2015). Resetting the Camera’s Clock: Sarony, Muybridge and the Aesthetics of Wet-Plate Photography. History & Technology: An International Journal 31(4), 482–491. doi:10.1080/07341512.2015.1090674