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
Global modernism, contemporary art, post-World War II Europe, historiography and methodology in art history, art and politics, the social history of art, critical theory, Romanticism.

Biography
My work addresses the entanglement of modern artistic strategies with the emergence of capitalism as a global economic and social order. I am particularly interested in supervising MA and PhD projects on global modernism, contemporary art, post-World War II European art, and historiography / methodology.

I have completed a book manuscript on the twentieth-century German artist Joseph Beuys. At the moment, I am working on two further single-author book projects. The first is provisionally entitled When is an Image an Idea? Warburg, Panofsky, and the Project of Iconology. The second, provisionally entitled The Plenipotentiary of Logic: Art in the Age of Mimetic Machines, is a study of relations between technical/economic rationality and art-making at three moments in modern history, namely the interwar period, the 1960s-70s, and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I am also co-editing a book on Romanticism in the visual arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

I am a founding editor of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, an online peer-reviewed publication. Most recently, I edited the journal’s fourth issue, which is dedicated to the topic of “Ideology, Strategy, Aesthetics.” 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.”

In 2023, I was a Wallace Fellow at Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. I was awarded the Joseph Beuys Prize for Research in 2022. My research has also been supported by grants from the Anna Polke Foundation, the UW Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities.

Selected Publications
“Fiction, Time, and Room-space in Three Pictures by Jeff Wall,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 81-82 (2024): 229-244.

“A Scheme Transfer for Global Modernism,” October 186 (fall 2023): 163-196.

“Legitimation Crisis: Notes on Benjamin Buchloh’s Method,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 86, no. 3 (October, 2023): 406-419.

“The Prehistoricity of Cinema: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” Film-Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 2 (2023), 282-300.

“Speculative Negation, or: A Dialectic of Modernism,” in: Marina Vishmidt, ed., Speculation (MIT Press, 2023) 69-76.

“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).

Teaching
AH 105: Introduction to Modernism
AH 227: The Ends of Modernism
AH 303: Topics in Art History
–From Pollock to Warhol
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