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
An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the position of Professor of Visual Studies with a cross-appointment in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Casid pursues a research practice across writing, photography, and film that is dedicated to queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial interventions. Casid exhibits their artwork nationally and internationally, including in recent exhibitions at Signs and Symbols and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York and Documenta fifteen. Casid’s current projects concern the question of doing things with being undone in the Necrocene and what aesthetics can do in confronting the political problem of form in the situation of crisis ordinary.

Casid is the author of 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) — now in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022). Casid also co-edited the collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014).

Recent essays and articles have appeared in journals ranging from Texte zur Kunst, Art in America, and Panorama to Photography and Culture, Women and Performance, TDR, and the Journal of Visual Culture, among others. Casid has contributed chapters to, among other collections, Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape (Diaphanes/Johns Hopkins, 2018), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean (Oxford, 2018), The Philosophical Salon (Open Humanities Press, 2017), and Architecture is All Over (Columbia, 2017). A widely published art writer and theorist, Casid dedicates a significant part of their practice to thinking with and writing on crip, queer, and trans*feminist art and aesthetics.

Casid was the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College (2018–19). Casid serves on the governing board of the International Association of Visual Culture and on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. Casid is the honored recipient of numerous awards for research and teaching, including the Kellett Mid-Career Award (2023), 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).

Selected Publications
Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Escenas de proyección: Reenvíos del sujeto iluminista, Spanish translation of Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject, trans. by Fermín Rodgriguez and Paola Cortes-Rocca (Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2022).

“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.

Untitled (Throw Out), 2017–22, color video with sound, 16 min. 30 seconds. New film commission from Ford Foundation Gallery for Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning, Oct. 1–Dec. 10, 2022, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York.
–Exhibited in Insurgent Flows, curated by Anita Hofer and Eva Ursprung, Kultur in Graz (KiG) in collaboration with steirischerherbst ’23, Graz, Austria, September 20-October 15, 2023.

Untitled (Melancholy as Medium), 2021, new film commission for Chapter V, Melancholy as Medium, of Indisposable: Structures of Support after the Americans with Disabilities Act, Ford Foundation Gallery, NYC, June 2021.
–Exhibited in Insurgent Flows, curated by Anita Hofer and Eva Ursprung, Kultur in Graz (KiG) in collaboration with steirischerherbst ’23, Graz, Austria, September 20–October 15, 2023.
–Exhibited in Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany, as part of Terracotta Friendship (July 27–Sept. 25, 2022), a collaboration between Jatiwangi Art Factory’s Terracotta Embassy and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea. Virtual exhibition space designed by Kang Seung Lee.
–Exhibited in Visualizing the Virus, a digital arts and humanities project led by Sria Chaterjee, head of research for the Paul Mellon Centre, London and supported by a DARIAH-EU grant and additional support from the Institute of Experimental Design and Media, FHNW and Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities.
–Exhibited in artists + allies iv, group exhibition curated by Mitra Korasheh, Signs and Symbols Gallery, NYC, August 1–September 25, 2021.

Spirochetes of Contact (2020), 24 original Polaroids and boardwalk support structure conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by Sylvie Rosenthal, collection reframing version exhibited with selection of Polaroids by Andy Warhol, in Faculty 2020 exhibition (juried by Gary Garrido Schneider, Executive Director of Grounds for Sculpture), Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, February 1–May 17, 2020.
–New version exhibited in Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning, Oct. 1–Dec. 10, 2022, Ford Foundation Gallery, New York.

Kissing on Main Street, artist book and installation catalogue with essays by Beth Zinsli and Lia Gangitano (Appleton, WI and Minneapolis, MN: Lawrence University and Bookmobile, 2016). In collection of Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York.

Kissing on Main Street, installation, solo exhibition, Kohler Gallery, Wriston Art Center Galleries, Lawrence University, March 31–May 8, 2016.

Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
–Awarded Millard Meiss grant from College Art Association (2003).

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.

Edited and Co-Edited Volumes and Journal Issues
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).

Articles and Book Chapters
“The Cut-Away Method,” in English and Spanish in Satanic Panic: Catalina Schliebener Muñoz (Santiago de Chile: 2023). [invited]

“Kink as Method,” Exhibition publication for Angelo Madsen Minax: Crisis of Human Contact, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex, England (February, 2023). [invited]

“The Unsettling Anarthistorical Call of Acknowledgment in the Necrocene/Das Ent-Setzen: Der Ruf einer Anarthistory nach Anerkennung im Nekropozän,” in “Art History Update,” Texte zur Kunst 128 (December 2022), 108–21. [invited]

Marquis Bey, Kara Carmack, Jill Casid, KJ Cerankowski, Sascha Crasnow, Stamatina Gregory, Jack Halberstam, Lex Morgan Lancaster, Cyle Metzger, Kirstin Ringelberg, Cole Rizki, Wiley Sharp, Eliza Steinbock, and Susan Stryker, “Trans Visibility and Trans Viability: A Roundtable,” Journal of Visual Culture 21.2 (August 2022), 297–320. [peer-reviewed]

“From the Back,” essay for broadside publication for Gordon Hall: Turn Back, document gallery, Chicago, September 2022. [invited]

“Incantography,” exhibition catalogue essay for Joy Episalla: crack fold burn bright, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, July 2022. [invited]

“Melancholy as Medium,” in special issue on “Exploring Indisposability: The Entanglements of Crip Art,” eds. Jessica Cooley and Ann Fox, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8.1 (Spring 2022). [peer-reviewed]

“Landscape Vertigo,” in special issue, “Moving Landscapes: Gardens and Gardening in the Transatlantic World, 1670–1830,” eds. Stephen Bending and Jennifer Milam, Huntington Library Quarterly 84.3 (Autumn 2021), 635–55. [peer- reviewed]

“With Palestine Still,” in “The Palestine Portfolio,” Journal of Visual Culture 20.2 (August 2021), 363–66. [peer-reviewed]

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

“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. [invited]

“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. [peer-reviewed]

“Palinode,” exhibition catalogue essay for Bill Jacobson: Regards, Hiram Butler Gallery (2019). [invited]

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

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

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

“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. [invited]

“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. [peer-reviewed]

“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. First published in The Philosophical Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 2016. [invited]

“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. [peer-reviewed]

Teaching
Recent Undergraduate Courses
ART HIST 130: 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
ART HIST 355: History and Theory of Photography, Introductory Lecture Course
ART HIST 354: 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