Before coming to Princeton in 2003, Brigid Doherty was Associate Professor of the History of Art and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, she held the inaugural Research Forum Visiting Professorship at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and in 2006-2007 she was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and an Affiliate Scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
A member of the Steering Committees of the Programs in Media & Modernity, European Cultural Studies, and the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton, she focuses her research and teaching on the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary art, literature, and film, with special emphasis on relationships among the visual arts, literature, and aesthetic theory in German modernism.
Recently, with her German Department colleagues Michael W. Jennings and Thomas Y. Levin, she co-edited a volume of writings by Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2008. Also in 2008, she participated in Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, in Trento, Italy, contributing a project called “The Museum of Learning Things,” which examined ways in which avant-garde artists and philosophers Germany and Austria in the 1920s variously engaged, adapted, and set out to renovate techniques of teaching and learning that had been developed in the nineteenth-century under the rubric of Anschauungsunterricht (a term that has been translated, since the mid-nineteenth century, as “instruction in perception”, “object-teaching”, “teaching through the senses”, and “training the senses”).
Doherty’s current research is connected to a book project, “Homesickness for Things,” which explores how, in 20th-century German modernism and its present-day aftermath, objects, among them persons and works of art, become containers for fantasies of return to a maternal body or family home (each broadly conceived, in material as well as symbolic terms). The project further explores how such fantasies come, in turn, to provide a basis for various ethical and political positions with regard to our understanding of history.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS (selected; since 2006) Edited Volume: Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (2008). Exhibition Catalogues: Rosemarie Trockel: Safety Curtain 2008/2009 (2008); Rosemarie Trockel: Post-Menopause (German edition, 2005; Italian edition, 2006); Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York, Paris (2006). Articles: “Introjektion, Übertragung, and literarische Medienreflexionen in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Briefe über Cézanne,” in Literarische Medienreflexionen, ed. Dieter Lamping (2007); “The Colportage Phenomenon of Space and the Place of Montage in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (2006); “On Iceberg and Water. Or, Painting and the ‘Mark of Genre’ in Rosemarie Trockel’s Wool-Pictures,” in MLN (2006); “Dwelling on ‘Spaces’,” in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (2006).
