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Eve Meltzer

Associate Professor
em113@nyu.edu
(212) 998-7339
424 - 1 Wash Pl

Office Hours
Wednesday 3:30 TO 4:30
Thursday 1:00 TO 3:00 (BY APPT)

B.A., Sculpture, Visual Arts, Brown University, 1993
M.A., Philosophy, Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 1998
Ph.D., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 2003

Eve Meltzer is associate professor of Visual Studies at Gallatin and is an affiliated faculty member in NYU's Department of Art History. She received her MA and PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests explore the intertwining of psychic life and visuality with a focus on the abiding questions of subjectivity and subjectification, particularly after antihumanism. She draws on the areas of modern and contemporary art history, the history and theory of photography, video, and film, and a range of philosophical and theoretical discourses including psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology, and affect theory. Her first book, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (University of Chicago Press, 2013) situates the conceptual art movement in relation to the field of structuralist thought, reframing two of the most transformative movements of the 20th century and their common dream of the world as a total sign system. Her second book, Not Me, Mine, Ours: Belonging and Psychic Life After Photography (under contract with University of Chicago Press), wagers that the relationship between the psyche and the camera is more intimate, complex, and important than we have yet to describe, particularly as it pertains to claims of belonging. Organized around three cases-Andrew Jarecki's film, Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016), and the artist Candice Breitz's video installation, Treatment (2013)--the book investigates the ways in which scenes of subjection operate photographically both in us and around us, making us adhere to one another in particular ways. Meltzer's course offerings include "The Photographic Imaginary," "The Thingliness of Things," "Race in the Visual Field: James Baldwin, America, and the Moving Image," "Psychoanalysis and the Visual," "Psychoanalysis, Race, and Racism," "What Was Conceptualism, and Why Won't It Go Away?" and "Feeling, in Theory."  

Awards & Honors

2022

Eve Meltzer Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching

Eve Meltzer is an associate professor of Visual Studies at Gallatin and is an affiliated faculty member in NYU's Department of Art History. She received her MA and PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests explore the intertwining of psychic life and visuality with a focus on the abiding questions of subjectivity and subjectification, particularly after antihumanism. She draws on the areas of modern and contemporary art history, the history and theory of photography, video, and film, and a range of philosophical and theoretical discourses including psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology, and affect theory.  

Grants & Fellowships

2020

Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship

Eve Meltzer was awarded a Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library to complete research towards and the writing of one chapter “Psyche Obscura, Camera Lucida: James Baldwin, America, and the Moving Image,” of her book-in-progress, Not-Me, Mine, Ours: Belonging After Photography.

Books

2013

Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and The Antihumanist Turn

Eve Meltzer's Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and The Antihumanist Turn was published by University of Chicago Press.

Teaching and Research Interests

contemporary art  theory  and criticism; history and theory of photography; history and theory of video; psychoanalysis; structuralism; phenomenology; affect theory; discourses on materiality and material culture 

Recent News

PUBLICATIONS

Eve Meltzer contributed the essay “Subjects” to A Concise Companion to Visual Culture, (Wiley, 2021).

“To Capture and To Hold: Camera, Psyche, and Belonging in Capturing the Friedmans,” drawn from Meltzer’s current book project, will be published in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Visual Culture in 2019.

Meltzer’s review of The Place of the Visual in Psychoanalytic Practice: Image in the Countertransference will appear in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2019.

Meltzer published a review of the film, Eva Hesse, titled “To Conjure Hesse” in Art Journal in the fall of 2016.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

In November of 2023, Meltzer  was invited to give the Richard Thune Lecture at University of Pennsylvania in the Department of History of Art. My lecture, “Not My Negro: The Work of the Negative in I Am Not Your Negro,” was drawn from her book-in-progress. https://arth.sas.upenn.edu/events/richard-thune-lecture-eve-meltzer-new-york-university-not-me-mine-ours-work-negative-i-am-not

In May of 2023,  Meltzer was invited to participate in a panel discussion with artist Sung Tieu and Keller Easterling on the occasion of Tieu's first solo exhibitions held at Amant and the MIT List Center for the Visual Arts: "Intra-Specter" and "Sung Tieu: Civic Floor."

Meltzer spoke about her essay "Subjects," published in A Concise Companion to Visual Culture (Wiley, 2021), to a group of graduate students in Art at the University of Wisconsin in April 2021.

Meltzer delivered “Systems We Have Loved” at The Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State University in April 2018.

She also presented “Systems We Have Loved” at 1:1 Systems Theory in Practice Since WWII at Yale University in April 2017.

Meltzer gave a talk titled “Group Photo: Towards a Psycho-Photographic Theory of Belonging,” drawn from her current book project, for the “Art in the Age of Things” Lecture series at The University of Illinois at Chicago in April 2017.

Eve Meltzer