Projects

• Community Commons

• Critical Medical Humanities: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Medicine

  (Colby College)

• Explorations in the Medical Humanities

  (Columbia University)

• CHCI Medical Humanities Institute: Global Health (University of Miami)

  (University of Miami)

biography

Tanya Sheehan is Distinguished Scholar and Director of Research at the Lunder Institute for American Art and William R. Kenan Jr. Associate Professor of Art at Colby College, where she teaches the history of American art, race and representation, and art and science. Before coming to Colby in 2013, she taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, Brown University, and Phillips Academy Andover. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018). Her edited volumes include Photography, History, Difference (2014), Photography and Its Origins (co-edited with Andres Zervigon, 2015), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), and Photography and Migration (2018). Since 2015 Tanya Sheehan has served as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal. Her current book project explores the relationship between medicine and modernism in the work of twentieth-century African American artists.

research interests