معرفی
Tanya Sheehan is the Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jette Professor of Art at Colby College, where she serves as Chair of the Humanities Division (2023-24, 2025-26) and Chair of the Science, Technology and Society Department (2024-27). She also holds the position of Director of Academic and Scholarly Engagement at the Colby Museum's Lunder Institute for American Art (2025-). Previously, she served as Director of Research at the Lunder Institute (2018-21), Director of the American Studies Program (2019-20), and Chair of the Department of Art (2015-18).
Her research sits at the intersection of American art history and critical medical humanities, with particular focus on photography, race, and medicine. She is the author of Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (2011) and Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (2018), which won a Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. Her current book project examines medicine and public health in modernist art by African Americans, for which she received a 2023 Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellowship.
She has co-edited Modernism, Art, Therapy (2024) and previously edited Photography and Migration (2018), Grove Art Guide to Photography (2017), and other significant works in her field. An essay from her current project on art therapy and Jacob Lawrence was published in The Art Bulletin in June 2024.
- Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant (2018)
- Boston Medical Library Fellowship in the History of Medicine (2019-20)
- Beinecke Visiting Senior Fellowship at CASVA (2023)
Since 2015, Sheehan has served as executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art Journal, developing special issues on African American art, Latino art, art and the environment, and other critical topics. She also leads Colby's Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab, a grant-funded faculty research initiative devoted to critical perspectives on the intersection of medicine and race. Her teaching covers American art history, African American visual culture, art and science, race and representation, and the history of photography, with emphasis on experiential learning and collaborative research.
