Eve Meltzer

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."