Daniel Spaulding

Education
B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 2008
M.A. Yale University, 2013
M.Phil. Yale University, 2013
Ph.D. Yale University, 2017

Research Interests
Contemporary art, global modernism, post-World War II Europe, historiography and methodology in art history, art and politics, the social history of art, critical theory, Romanticism.

Biography
I am a scholar of 20th and 21st century art, with a focus on Western Europe in the post-World War II era. In the broadest terms, my work addresses the entanglement of modern artistic strategies with the emergence of capitalism as a global economic and social order.

My first book project is a study of the 20th century German artist Joseph Beuys. Here I argue that Beuys’ work represents a sustained though problematic working-through of transformations in the postwar West German welfare state at the cusp of the neoliberal era. My second book will consider the rationalities involved in art-making through case studies of the articulation of mimetic technologies, capitalist production, and the laboring body over the past century. Although my research is anchored in the 20th century, I have a strong investment in tracing back genealogies of recent art to much earlier moments of crisis and critique, such as the moment of Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century. I am also expanding my research and, especially, my teaching to reflect recent work in the field of global modernist art history.

A further area of my research is the historiography and methodology of art history, with an emphasis on the German intellectual tradition during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am a founding editor of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, an online peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of past models of art interpretation, with a particular emphasis on “radical” approaches to art history and criticism. Our aim, per the journal’s mission statement, is to “channel the study of art towards a more urgent engagement with our current state of crisis, both within and without the academy.”

Selected Publications
“Panofsky’s Antinomies,” Journal of Art Historiography 25 (December 2021):1–31.

“Greenberg avec Mao: Supports/Surfaces and the Specific Contradiction of Painting,” Selva: A Journal of the History of Art 1 (Fall 2019):91–114.

“Unworking Posenenske,” in Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress, ed. Jessica Morgan, 162–77 (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2019).

“The Red Flag: The Art and Politics of German Maoism,” with Lauren Graber, in Art, Global Maoism, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, eds. Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-García, and Victoria H.F. Scott, 109–27 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

Teaching
AH 105: Introduction to Modernism
AH 227: The Ends of Modernism
AH 408: Topics in Twentieth-Century Art
–Global Modernism
AH 409: Interpreting Contemporary Art
AH 500: Special Topics in Art History Proseminar
–The Art of Antagonism
AH 556: Proseminar in 20th Century European Art
–Art in Europe, 1945–1975
AH 600: Special Topics in Art History
–Global Modernism
AH 701: Practicum in Art History: Bibliography, Historiography, Methods
AH 800: Special Topics in Art History Seminar
–The Art of Antagonism
AH 856: Graduate Seminar in Twentieth Century European Art
–Art in Europe, 1945–1975
–From Magic to Art