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The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern. Duke University Press, 2006.

“Professor Soussloff has managed, in her philosophical and art historical reflections on the portrait in modernity, to bring important insights to our understanding of the relation between the individual and history. In focusing on the ‘subject’ in the individual as revealed and hidden in modern portraiture, Soussloff exposes many of the open secrets of modernist historical consciousness as well.” Hayden White, Presidential Professor of Historical Studies Emeritus, UCSC; Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University


The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

The myth of the artist-genius has long had a unique hold on the imagination of Western culture. Iconoclastic, tempermental, and free from constraints of society, these towering figures have been treated as fixed icons regardless of historical context or individual situation. In The Absolute Artist Soussloff challenges this view in an engaging consideration of the social construction of the artist from the fifteenth century to the present.


Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press: 1999).

“The goal of this volume…is to introduce the subject of Jewish identity to art history and to explore its complexities…The contributions cover issues ranging from the concept of Jewish art, aniconism, and anti-Semitism to the importance of Jewish identity to numerous artists, collectors, and art historians. While there are recurring themes in this volume, Soussloff is as interested in outlining the great variety of materiel surrounding the notion of Jewish identity in art history and indicating its theoretical significance.” Mitchell Frank, CAA Online Reviews (Spring 2000).


Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, Ed. by Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1999).

The essays in this volume reveal that the interconnections between traditional disciplinary boundaries can be productive places from which to launch new and innovative critique. Many of the contributors to this volume, including Mark Franko (Theater Arts and Dance), Catherine Soussloff (Art History), Carolyn Dean (Art History), and Karen Bassi (Classics and Literature), are professors at UC Santa Cruz where they were Core Faculty in the planning for a new Ph.D. program in Visual and Performance Studies (VPS). This graduate program would have brought together innovative scholars from arts, cultural anthropology, and the humanities in advanced scholarly research and teaching according to an interdisciplinary and collaborative model.
“An extremely unusual collection, Acting on the Past establishes a dialogue between conventional and theoretical approaches to historical performance studies, on the one hand, and foregrounds the importance of early performance for an understanding of what has become known as the discipline of `performance studies… The book will become an influential source text in performance studies, both old and new.” Timothy Murray, Cornell University

 

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