Eve Meltzer is assistant professor of visual studies with research and teaching interests in the areas of contemporary art history and criticism, the history and theory of photography, material culture and a range of philosophical and theoretical discourses including psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology, and affect theory. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. From 2003 to 2006, she was a Stanford Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History. Her first book, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2013. The book situates the conceptual art movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s in relation to the field of structuralist thought and, in effect, offers a new framing for and insight into two of the most transformative movements of the 20th century and their common dream of the world as a total sign system. Meltzer is beginning work on her second book project, tentatively titled Group Photo: The Psycho-Photographic Process and the Making of Group Identity , which will explore the proposition that group identity—at least since the invention of photography, if not before—has at its foundation something we might call a psycho-photographic process. Meltzer has published articles, exhibition essays, and reviews on the work of Vito Acconci, Jeanne Dunning, Roberto Jacoby, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Larry Sultan and Peter Wegner, among others. Her course offerings include “The Photographic Imaginary,” “The Thingliness of Things,” “Psychoanalysis and the Visual,” “What Was Conceptualism, and Why Won’t It Go Away?”, and “Feeling, in Theory.”
