Lisa Uddin
Associate Professor of Art History, Paul Garett Fellow
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Olin Hall 121
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509-527-4964
Professor Uddin is an historian of U.S. American art, visual culture, and the built environment in the African Diaspora. She researches how expressive formations of blackness and anti-blackness have built, and rebuilt, the United States, and how these formations connect to Black migrations and solidarities. Her teaching connects modern and contemporary art and architecture to critical-reparative projects, from climate change science to movements for social justice. Professor Uddin grew up in a Swedish and Bengali white-collar immigrant family in suburban Toronto, and with artists, architects and community radio broadcasters in urban Montreal. Before coming to Whitman, she taught art history at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. and did postdoctoral research in the environmental humanities at the University of Minnesota and Brown University’s Pembroke Center.
Education
Ph.D. Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
2009
M.A. Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
2006
M.A. Media Studies
Concordia University-Montréal
2002
B.A. North American Studies
McGill University
1996
Courses Taught by Professor Uddin
- Photographing Difference
- Architectures of Race
- Critical Art History
- Mayhem, Machines, Manifestos: Modernism in Art and Architecture
- Blackness and the Arts
- Indigenous Aesthetics: Native North American Art and Visual Culture
- Senior Seminar in Art History
Professor Uddin is the author of Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which examines the shift from “naked cages” to naturalistic enclosures in U.S. zoos of 1960s and 70s. Reading architectural designs, institutional histories and popular zoo media, the book situates global wildlife conservation within the racial and spatial logics of U.S. urban renewal. Uddin shows how the material and symbolic emergence of endangered species displays in and around American zoos unfolded as the resurgence of white anti-urbanism in the long postwar period. Reviewers praised the book as a “surprising perspective on urban and racial issues” (Planning Magazine) that “adds a new dimension to what has become the standard historical understanding of zoos' relationship to race and empire” (Buildings and Landscapes) and “helps us to see zoos, and cities more widely, as multispecies environments, where humans and animals came together to shape the contours of urban life.” (Journal of American Studies). Research materials for this book are now housed at the Whitman College and Northwest Archives.
Prof. Uddin also co-edited with Michael B. Gillespie (NYU) Black One Shot, an online art criticism series devoted to blackness and the arts. Launched in 2018, and written by leading and emerging scholars and curators of black visual and expressive culture, the series consisted of 85 pieces over 21 transmissions. Essays had a 1000 word limit and each were devoted to a single work of art, broadly conceived. Contributors resisted the pressures to formulate complex discussions of blackness for easy public consumption by making creative-critical space for its often speculative, ambivalent, and irreconcilable forms.
Her current research, “Open Black: Making Space in the Settler West,” examines spatial production through visual culture under the forces of anti-Black racism and Indigenous dispossession. Moving across multiple site-sensitive expressive modalities and racialized assemblages, her study considers what happens when settler colonial productions of “open space” reconfigure through the African Diaspora.
“The Fugitivity of Black Panther Oakland,” in Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture, eds. Greg Castillo and Lee Stickells (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press).
Black One Shot, eds. Lisa Uddin and Michael Boyce Gillespie, ASAP/J, 2018-2022.
“And Thus Not Glowing Brightly: Noah Purifoy’s Junk Modernism,” in Race and Modern Architecture, eds. Mabel O. Wilson, Irene Cheng, Charles Davis. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.
“Radical Shit: Countercultural Autonomy and Composting Toilet Design,” ASAP/J, February 13, 2020.
“Thumper’s Descent,” ASAP/J, August 13, 2018.
“The Matter of Black Life," Los Angeles Review of Books, January 7, 2016.
Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
2019, Louis B. Perry Faculty-Student Summer Research Scholarship, Whitman College
2018, Paul Garrett Fellowship for excellence in research, teaching and service, Whitman College
2017, Getty Library Research Grant, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA
2017, Sally Ann Abshire award for faculty-student research, Whitman College
2012, Corcoran College of Art and Design Faculty Development Research Grant
2009, Quadrant Fellowship in Environment, Culture and Sustainability, University of Minnesota, MN
2008-09, Pembroke Postdoctoral Fellowship, Brown University, Providence RI
2007, Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington DC
2007, Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, Garden Club of America and Landscape Architecture Foundation
2004, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender & Women’s Studies, Graduate Research Grant
2004, University of Rochester, Celeste Hughes Bishop Award for academic accomplishments, teaching achievements, and general contributions
2002-06, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Doctoral Fellowship
2002-04, Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, Québec, Doctoral Fellowship