Jill H. Casid

Professor of Visual Studies in Department of Art History and Department of Gender and Women’s Studies
Director of Graduate Studies

Education
B.A. Princeton University, 1988
M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1989
Ph.D. Harvard University, 1999

Research Interests
Visual Culture, early modern to contemporary, Europe and the Americas; History and Theory of Landscape; Decolonial and Postcolonial Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory, Crip Theory and Queer and Trans Theory; Media Archaeology; and Visual Studies connecting Historical Study, Theoretical Speculation, and Studio Practice.

Biography
Jill H. Casid is Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she has a cross appointment in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. A cluster hire in Visual Culture, she founded and served as the first director of the Center for Visual Cultures. A historian, theorist, and practicing artist, her contributions to the transdisciplinary field of visual studies include her monographs Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005) which received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is being translated into Spanish and forthcoming from Metales Pesados press and the edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014) co-edited with Aruna D’Souza. Recent articles have appeared in Art in America, Photography and Culture, L.A. Review of Books, Women and Performance, TDR, and the Journal of Visual Culture and she has contributed essays to, among other volumes, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing (Krannert Art Museum, 2021), Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape (Diaphanes, 2018), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean (Peter Lang, 2018), The Philosophical Salon (Open Humanities Press, 2017), and Architecture is All Over (Columbia, 2017). She is currently completing the two-book project Form at the Edges of Life. She serves on the governing board of the International Association of Visual Culture and on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her research and teaching, including the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Award (2015), the Vilas Research Investigator Award (2014), the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2011), and the Hamel Faculty Fellowship (2009). In 2018–19, she was in residence as the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She will be on research leave in Spring 2022.

Selected Publications
Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Spanish translation by Fermín Rodgriguez and Paola Cortes-Rocca under contract with Metales Pesados press (forthcoming, fall 2023).

“Sombras del Iluminismo: escenas de proyección,” introduction from Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Spectator (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Spanish translation by Fermín Rodriguez for theory dossier on “cinema y sus medios” in special issue edited by Jorge Pavez Ojeda of Escrituras Americanas vol. 5, no 1/2 (July 2021), 4–52.

Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Awarded Millard Meiss grant from College Art Association.

Extract of “Revolting Landscape,” from Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Portuguese translation in special issue on Black Portugal of La Rampa 4 (2021), 61–62.

Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, co-edited with Aruna D’Souza, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

Kissing on Main Street, artist book with essays by Lia Gangitano and Beth Zinsli (Lawrence University, 2016).

Untitled (Melancholy as Medium), color video with sound, 9 min. 43 seconds. Film, in artists + allies iv, group exhibition curated by Mitra Korasheh, Signs and Symbols Gallery, 2021, August 1–September 25, 2021.

Untitled (Melancholy as Medium), color video with sound, 9 min. 43 seconds, new film commission for Chapter V, Melancholy as Medium, of Indisposable: Structures of Support after the Americans with Disabilities Act, Ford Foundation Gallery, June 2021 (online).

“Landscape Vertigo,” in special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly: “Moving Landscapes:
Gardens and Gardening in the Transatlantic World, 1670-1830,” eds. Stephen Bending and
Jennifer Milam (in proofs, forthcoming 2021).

“With Palestine Still,” in “The Palestine Portfolio,” Journal of Visual Culture 20.2 (August 2021).

“They Did What They Could Do at the Time: Thinking with and after Lauren Berlant,” Art in America (July 20, 2021).

“Queer Expressivity; or How to Do It with Louise Fishman,” A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing (Champaign, Illinois: Krannert Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2021), 47–59.

“Thanatography: Working the Folds of Photography’s Wild Performativity in Capital’s Necrocene,” special issue of Photography and Culture on “Capitalism and the Limits of Photography,” edited by Kevin Coleman and Daniel James 13.2 (June 2020), 213–38.

“Doing Things with Being Undone,” Journal of Visual Culture 18.1 (2019): 30–52.

“Necropolitics at Sea,” Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean, Shifting Cultures in 21st-Century Europe, ed. Claudia Gualtieri (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018), 193–214.

“Necrolandscaping,” Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape, eds. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018), 237–64.

“Queer Deformativity,” The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery & American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004), eds. Jeannine Tang, Lia Gangitano, and Ann Butler (New York: Dancing Foxes Press, 2018), 213–37.

“Landscaping for Chimeras,” Architecture is All Over, eds. Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017), 268–83.

“A State of Foreclosure: The Guantánamo Prison,” The Philosophical Salon: Twenty-First Century Speculations, Reflections, Interventions, eds. Patricia Vieira and Michael Marder (London: Open Humanities Press, 2017), 226–28.

“Visual Representations,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History ed. Joseph C. Miller, associate eds. Vincent Brown, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Laurent Dubois and Karen Ordhal Kupperman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 468–76.

“Alter-Ovid—Contemporary Art on the Hyphen,” A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, eds. John F. Miller and Carole Newlands (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 416–35.

“Turning the ‘Fearful Sphere’: Prepositional Tactics in and for the Global,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, co-edited with Aruna D’Souza, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 213–27.

“Pyrographies: Photography and the Good Death,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 22.1 (2012):109–31.

“Handle with Care,” TDR/Drama Review 56.4(Winter 2012):123–37.

“Cis,” Journal of Visual Culture 11 (2012):140–44.

“Landscape in, around, and under the Performative,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 21.1 (2011):97–116.

“Chimerical Figurations at the Monstrous Edges of Species,” Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Stephanie Lemenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (London: Routledge Press, 2011), 61–83.

Teaching

Recent Undergraduate Courses
Introduction to Visual Cultures: Seeing Race: Anti-Racism and Visual Culture, new undergraduate lecture course
Crip Tactics, new Honors-Only Seminar, cross-listed between Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Art History
Queer Theory, Visual Culture, Intermediate Lecture Course, cross-listed between Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies and Art History
History and Theory of Photography, Introductory Lecture Course
Cross-Cultural Arts around the Atlantic Rim, Introductory Lecture Course, Fulfills Ethnic Studies Requirement

Recent Graduate Courses
History, Theory & Methods in the Study of Visual Cultures
Necrocene, Necropolitics, Necrolandscaping
What is Art History?
The Deaths and Afterlives of Queer Theory
Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture
Bioethics and Aesthetics
After the Global Turn