Contact Barbara Zabel
Education
B.A., University of Colorado; M.A., University of Texas; Ph.D., University of Virginia
Barbara Zabel
Professor of Art History
Chair, Department of Art History and Architectural Studies, 2003-2005
On leave, Spring 2008
Joined Connecticut College: 1977
Specialization:
- American art
- European art of the 20th century
- Art and technology in the modern era
- Gender issues in Modernism
Barbara Zabel received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia with a specialization in American and Modern art. Her most recent book is titled Assembling Art: The Machine and the American Avant-Garde, in which she investigates how artists responded to the advent of the machine as the governing paradigm for modern culture.
In recent publications, Zabel explores gender issues raised by machine-age art; these include "Expatriates of the Machine Age: Josephine Baker and Alexander Calder in Paris," in National Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France - Frenchmen in America (Rodopi, 2001); "The Constructed Self: Gender and Portraiture in Machine-Age America," in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (MIT, 1999); "Gendered Still Life: Paintings of Still Life in the Machine Age"; in Modernism, Gender, and Culture (Garland, 1997); and "The Machine and New York Dada," in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, exhibition catalogue (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996).
Zabel has participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in Zurich and a DAAD program in Germany, and has received research grants from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2003, she received the Joshua C. Taylor Senior Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where she began research for a book on the portraits of sculptor Alexander Calder. She presented the results of preliminary research at the Smithsonian, "Calder and the New Woman in Paris" (2003), and at a conference of the Society for Literature and Technology, "Spirit of St. Louis: Calder's Portrait of Flight," Austin, TX (2003).
On campus Zabel has been active in the Center for Arts and Technology, the American Studies Program, and the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, where she serves on the Board and chairs the Exhibitions Committee. She has taught a wide variety of courses on American and European modernism, including "Vienna 1900," "New York Dada," "Modern Art," and "Art Since 1945."
Zabel has also developed a course on the Art and Film of the American West, which she has taught both as a Freshman and a Senior seminar.
View the art history department site.