Wendy Castenell Assistant Professor of Art History

Wilson Hall 3017
540-458-8465
wcastenell@wlu.edu

Education

University of Missouri—Columbia, MO, 2006-2012. Ph.D. in Art History (Major Field: American Art and Visual Culture; Minor Field: Film Studies), awarded July 2012. Dissertation: “Color Outside the Line: Liminality and Creole Identity in Louisiana from the Colonial Era to Reconstruction” [Committee: Kristin Schwain (chair), Keith Eggener, Michael Yonan, and Joanna Hearne], nominated for the University of Missouri Distinguished Dissertation Award. Research interests: American art and visual culture, colonial era to World War II; African American art; portraiture; intersectionalities of race and gender; representations of race and ethnicity in American visual culture; film history and theory; hybridity and cross-cultural contact

University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, M.A. in Art History awarded May 2003.

Tulane University, New Orleans, LA,B.A. in Art History awarded May 1997.

Teaching

ARH 253: Survey of Western Art II; ARH 291: Special Topics in African American Art (The Black Arts Movement); ARH 377: American Painting and Sculpture; ARH 378: Art of the African Diaspora; ARH 380: American Art, 1880-1945; ARH 388: African American Art; ARH 389: Harlem Renaissance Art; ARH 488: Special Topics in African American Art (African American Photography); ARH 488: (Special Topics in African American Art (African American Portraits); ARH 490: Art History Theory and Methods; ARH 550: Literature of Art; ARH 577: Turn-of-the-Century American Spectacles and Race; ARH 577: African American Film; ARH 577: African American Photography New Course Submitted: ARH 390: Indigenous North American Art

Selected Publications

Articles
“’The Louisiana Experiment’: Alcès Portraits and Afro-Creole Leadership during Reconstruction,” in “In the Round” on Southern Art, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 6.1 (June 2020).

[Forthcoming]: “Visualizing the Treaty: Indigenous Sovereignty in The Invaders,” HyperCultura, Spring 2023.

“Urban Development in New Orleans, World War II to Present,” New Orleans Historic and Cultural Review, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 2007): 55-65, http://www.suno.edu/docs/NOHCR%20Volume%20One%20Issue%20One%20WEB.pdf, Southern University of New Orleans.

Book Reviews
Book Review of Kymberly N. Pinder. Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), to be published in CAA.Reviews, 2/15/18.

Book Review of Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color by Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsey Leimenstoll, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70:2 (2011): 260-261.

Works in Progress
Books
“Creole Identity in the Art of the American South: Louisiana from the Colonial Era to Reconstruction” [manuscript under contract with Routledge/Taylor & Francis; projected publication, Spring 2023.]

“’Old Kentucky Home’: Nostalgia and Salvage Ethnography in Helen Balfour Morrison’s Kentucky Photographs” [book chapter in monograph on Helen Balfour Morrison, co-written with Liesl Olsen and Amy Mooney, projected publication in 2024.]

“Dark Amusements: Spectacles of Race in Turn-of-the-Century American Visual Culture” [3rd manuscript in development.]

Articles in Development
[Forthcoming]: “Une Famille Extraordinaire: Relationailty of Metoyer Family Portraits, Caste, and Race in Antebellum Louisiana,” in “In the Round,” on Relationality in Art, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (September 2023).

Working Title: “Constructing a Black Middle-Class Identity in Jim Crow New Orleans” [article in development for Nineteenth-Century Studies.]

Editorial
Co-editor, Special Edition on Race, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Spring 2024.