Melissa Johnson
- About
- Education
- Research
Biography
Melissa Johnson is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Illinois State University. She has been a member of the ISU faculty since 2004 and teaches in the areas of modern art, history of photography, and visual culture.
She holds a Ph.D. in art history from Bryn Mawr College, a M.I.L.S. in archives from The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and a B.A. in art history and English from The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She is on Core faculty for Women's & Gender Studies.
Current Courses
266.001European Art from Neoclassicism Through Impressionism
280.001Modern Art
311.001Seminar in Visual Culture, History, and Theory
311.002Seminar in Visual Culture, History, and Theory
Teaching Interests & Areas
Modern art, history of photography, gender, craft, visual culture
Research Interests & Areas
Dr. Johnson’s research focuses on the histories of modern and contemporary art, craft, collage & montage, and gender & identity. Her current research examines the intersection of craft with modern and contemporary art. She is currently working on several projects: an examination of the needlework and handiwork of Hannah Höch in the 1910s and early 1920s; a study of artists making work in response to the writings of Virginia Woolf; a study on mending and repair.
Publications include: “A Desire in the Process of Becoming,” Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy (University Galleries of Illinois State University: Normal, IL, 2017); “Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch’s Dadaist Italienreise,” Colloquia Germanica (Vol. 46, 2013 [2016], Issue 3; “Weimar Cultural Production: Visual Pleasure and Radical Critique in the Work of Hannah Höch,” in Essays on Women’s Artistic and Cultural Contributions 1919-1939: Expanded Social Roles for the New Woman Following the First World War (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009); and “Souvenirs of Amerika: The Weimar Mass-Media Scrapbook of Hannah Höch,” in The Scrapbook in American Life (Temple University Press, 2006).