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Robin Greeley

Robin Greeley
Associate Professor of Art History
PhD, University of California – Berkeley
robin.greeley@uconn.edu

Robin Adèle Greeley is Associate Professor of Latin American Art History. Dr. Greeley received her S.M.Arch.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1988), and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1996). Dr. Greeley is the author of Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (Yale University Press, 2006), which won the 2008 Eleanor Tufts Book Award. She is co-editor (with A. Anreus and L. Folgarait) of Mexican Muralism: A Hemispheric Perspective (University of California Press, 2009), and is co-editing (with Harvey Weiss, Yale University) Empire in the Middle East: Antiquity to the British Mandate (forthcoming). She is currently working on her fourth book, Between Campesino and State: the Mexican Avant-garde and Images of the Nation, 1920-1950, for which she was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. This book treats the Mexican State’s use of the avant-garde in its efforts to modernize the nation’s rural peoples. It looks at aesthetic projects oriented directly at the peasantry, and assesses not only elite intentions, but also campesino responses. The book examines the period in which Mexico was rapidly industrializing in an effort to engage competitively in global capitalist circuits, and aims to provide insight into the strategies, costs and histories of nation-building and modernization at all social levels. 

In addition to a Rockefeller and a Howard, Dr. Greeley is the recipient of numerous other national and international grants from institutions such as the Getty Foundation, the Fulbright, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between the Spanish Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities, and the Joan Miró Foundation, among others. Dr. Greeley was Reviews Editor for Art Journal (2003-06) and is coordinator of the Beverly and Raymond Sackler Art and Archaeology Lectures. She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, San Quentin Federal Penitentiary, and U.C. Berkeley. Her research specialties are Politics and Art; 20c art in Mexico, Europe and Latin America; Marxist theory; and Postcolonial theory.