Alexis Boylan

Professor, Director of Academic Affairs of the Humanities Institute

Art History, Africana Studies

Ph.D., October 2001 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Department of Art History M.A.,

1997 Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Department of Art History B.A.,

1994 Bryn Mawr College, History major

Research Specialties: 18th-21st Century Visual Culture of the United States, African American Art and Critical Race Studies, Gender and Queer Theories, Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture

Alexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute. Her research focus is on the visual culture of the United States from the colonial to the contemporary periods with particular emphasis on race and gender. She is the author of Visual Culture (MIT Press, 2020), Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), co-author of Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road (University of Minnesota, 2020), editor of Thomas Kinkade, The Artist in the Mall (Duke University Press, 2017), and editor of the forthcoming Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender, Art, and Business (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). She has published in American Art, Archives of American Art Journal, Boston Review, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Public Books.

Her next book focuses on the art created for the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City and how art and science antagonize and inspire cultural dialogues about truth and knowledge.