As a Senior Research Fellow at UC Berkeley, C. Oliver O’Donnell is a core collaborator on the Depictured Worlds Project, sponsored by the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich(link is external). He is a historian of modern art and intellectual history with a particular focus on US-American traditions of modernity. He has held research and teaching appointments at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Warburg Institute, the University of Basel, and at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. When not at Berkeley, he is a Resident Art Historian at Hill-Stead Museum(link is external), where he also teaches at Trinity College.
Oliver’s research focuses on issues of transmission and exchange between art history and intellectual history broadly construed. His first book exemplifies this interest and was awarded the 2019 Willibald Sauerländler Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. The book charts how the art historian Meyer Schapiro, who was close friends with many of the leading abstract expressionists, worked from the nexus of artistic and intellectual practice to confront some of the 20th century’s most abiding questions. A second book, now in production with Penn State University Press, makes an art-historical intervention on the history of ideas by investigating the roles that specific pictures played in a canonically understood history of empiricist philosophy.
Building on this research, Oliver’s current work concerns the Ashcan school of painting, specifically in relation to the thesis of the Depictured Worlds Project and the growing geo-political power of the United States between 1898 and the First World War. He is also a Research Notes Editor of Panorama: the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.
