Julia Hamer-Light
Americanist
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
Education
M.A., Art History, University of Delaware, 2021
B.A., American Studies, Yale University, 2018
Research Interests
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century American art; craft; ecocriticism; material culture.
Biography
Before coming to the University of Delaware, Julia received her B.A. in American Studies from Yale University (2018), where her senior thesis looked at landscapes of settler colonialism in northwest Nebraska. At the Yale University Art Gallery, she was a gallery guide and a student research assistant in the Department of American Paintings & Sculpture. She has held internships and research assistantships at the Toledo Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Winterthur Museum, Gardens & Library. On campus, she is a member of the University of Delaware Anti-Racism Initiative's (UDARI) Indigenous Programming Committee.
Current Research Projects
Julia Hamer-Light's dissertation will focus on the influence of Native art and the participation of Native artists in the studio craft movements of the 1950s through the 1970s. After World War II, U.S. nationalism ensnared the concept of “craft” as part of a project to create a distinctly “American” art. At the same time, Native artists were making new work in fiber, clay, wood, and other media that contributed to radical artistic and educational movements but are rarely included in the history of modern art. She considers how the ideas and work of Native artists were central to the aesthetics and ideologies of postwar studio craft movements.
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