Pamela Lee, recently named as the Carnegie Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, is an art historian who teaches the history, theory, and criticism of late modernism and contemporary art with research interests in the relationship between aesthetics, politics, time, and system.
Lee is considered a key figure in the transformation of the history of art in the last two decades. A leader in the field of modern and contemporary art, Lee is fundamentally concerned with questions of space, time, and system, as manifested in the individual work of art. She addresses the relationship between technology, politics, and artistic production, and chronicles the nature of artistic media in the post-modern world.
Lee’s courses include lectures and seminars on Abstract Expressionism; the art of the 1960s; contemporary art and globalization; intergenerational and intersectional feminism; methods and historiography; art and technology; modernism and war; and media cultures of the Cold War.
A 1988 graduate of Yale College, Lee earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University. For more than 20 years she taught at Stanford University, where most recently she held the Osgood Hooker Professorship in Fine Arts. She joined the Yale faculty as a professor of modern and contemporary art in July 2018.
Lee is the author of four books: “Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark,” “Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s,” “Forgetting the Art World,” and “New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art.” Two new books are forthcoming: “Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present” and “The Glen Park Library: A Fairytale of Disruption.”
The Yale professor is also a prolific contributor of journal articles, reviews, and catalogue essays. She serves on the editorial board of OCTOBER, a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in contemporary art, criticism, and theory.
