Christine Poggi is Professor Emerita of modern and contemporary art and criticism in the History of Art Department, and in the Italian Section, Romance Languages. She was also a member of the Graduate Group at Penn in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and an affiliated member of the Program in Slavic Languages and Literatures. From 2011 to 2014, she served as the Faculty Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for the Study of Gender, Sexuality, and Women.
Professor Poggi received her Master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2009, she received the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Arts and Sciences.
Research Interests
Christine Poggi’s research has focused on early twentieth-century European avant-gardes, the invention of collage and constructed sculpture, the rise of abstraction, and the relationship of art to emerging forms of labor and technology. She also works on the art of the sixties and seventies and on contemporary art. Current research projects address the nexus of immigration, crossing borders, mapping, and labor in contemporary performance and film, and the restaging of avant-garde works in contemporary art. She remains interested in the relation of art, newspaper, and other forms of mass media, and in the ways works of art address singular or collective beholders.
Selected Publications
Christine Poggi’s book, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton University Press, 2009) was awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association for a book on any phase of literature, comparative literature, or culture dealing with Italian. She is also co-editor, with Lawrence Rainey and Laura Wittman, of a new collection of Futurist manifestos, creative texts, and images, titled Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009).
Other publications include In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (Yale University Press, 1992), and essays in Modernism/Modernity, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, The Art Bulletin, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Res, Modern Painters, and numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogues. In 2008 she co-curated (with Meredith Malone) an exhibition on the work of Vito Acconci held at the Slought Foundation ("Power Fields: Explorations in the Work of Vito Acconci").
Her essays have explored a variety of topics including the representation of madness in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century French and Italian art, the appeal to crowds in the art of the last two centuries, the Futurist art of noise, Picasso’s first constructed sculpture, the handling of materials in Cubism, the representation of sexual difference in Picasso’s early nudes, the multiple roles played by newspaper in the art of the fifties and sixties, and the nexus of art, photography and technology circa 1922.
Courses Taught
GRADUATE SEMINARS:
Cubism; Andy Warhol and Pop Art; Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage, Cunningham, and Rainer; Twentieth-Century Theory and Criticism; Futurism; Vito Acconci Curatorial Seminar; Russian Avant-Garde: Text, Image, Object, Action (with Prof. Kevin M. F. Platt); Modernism Across Borders (with Prof. Kevin M. F. Platt)
UNDERGRADUATE LECTURES:
Art of the European Avant-Gardes, 1900-1945; Renaissance/Modern, 1400 to the Present (with Prof. Michael Cole); Renaissance to Contemporary (with Prof. André Dombrowski); Contemporary Art, 1945 to the Present
UNDERGRADUATE SEMINARS:
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Art; The Venice Biennale Seminar; Andy Warhol; Picasso; Art History Methods; Art and Criticism of the Sixties and Seventies
