Heather Hole

Professor Heather Hole teaches museum studies and art history at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons University. Her research focuses on the history, theory, and practice of art curation in the United States. She is the author of Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism (Yale University Press) and curator of the associated traveling exhibition.

• Education: PhD in Art History from Princeton University, BA in Art History from Smith College

Her research examines intersections of art, colonialism, and social justice. Recent work explores how transatlantic slavery shaped colonial American art and how nativist ideologies influenced early 20th-century museum period rooms.

Professor Hole's publications highlight colonial American art and its socio-political contexts. Her recent articles analyze the Metropolitan Museum of Art's period rooms and John Smibert's portraiture in relation to slavery.

• 2022 Best Advisor Award, Student Government Association, Simmons University