Kelly Dennis
Assistant Professor of Art History
Faculty Affiliate, European Studies
PhD, UCLA
kelly.dennis@uconn.edu

Kelly Dennis (Ph.D., UCLA, 1994) is Assistant Professor of Art History and faculty in the Center for European Studies. While completing graduate work at UCLA, she also studied with Hubert Damisch, Louis Marin, and Samuel Weber at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1990-92). Her research interests include genealogies of erotic and pornographic imagery in various media; environmental policy in relation to contemporary landscape photography and post-object art; censorship and human rights issues surrounding the body in Cold-War era video, conceptual, and performance art; and hybrid media technologies, digital and ‘Net culture and their relation to the neo-liberal economics of globalization.

Her forthcoming books include ART / PORN: A History of Seeing and Touching (Berg Publishers, U.K.), and an edited volume, Defining the Digital Canon: Art History and the Digital Image. Her previously published work has appeared in the Art Journal, History of Photography, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics and in edited volumes, encyclopedias, and exhibition catalogs. Presentations at international conferences include the Forum UNESCO international conference on Landscape, Cultural Heritage, and the Challenges of Citizenship (Nottingham, U.K., 2005); Thinking Photography (Again) (Durham, U.K., 2005); the inaugural conference of the Humanities Institute and Human Rights Institute, The Public and Private Uses of Violence (University of Connecticut, 2003); and ISEA, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (Chicago, 1997). She has been a consultant for film and theater productions on sexuality and cultural representation, including the documentary film on photographer Spencer Tunick, Naked States: The Movie (dir. Arlene Donnelly, HBO/Cinemax Productions, 2001).

Dr. Dennis’s teaching areas include Modern and Contemporary art, the histories of photography, video and performance art, and digital and new media. She has taught at Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Center College of Design, and at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Center for European Studies