C. Oliver O’Donnell 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.
Oliver’s research focuses on issues of transmission and exchange between art history and intellectual history broadly construed. His first book, developed from his PhD thesis, 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.
Building on this research, Oliver’s current work concerns the Ashcan school of painting, specifically in relation to 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.
Select Publications
Monographs
Portraits of Empiricism: Art Histories from an Intellectual Tradition. The Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming in 2026.
Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019.
Edited Volumes and Special Issues
"Ex-Artists in America," a section of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, issue 10.1 (June 2024).
Art History Before English: Negotiating a European Lingua Franca from Vasari to the Present, edited by Robert Brennan, C. Oliver O’Donnell, Marco Mascolo, and Alessandro Nova (Officina Libraria, Milan, 2022)
Journal Articles
"The Armory Show, Walt Kuhn, and Settler Modernism," Archives of American Art Journal (forthcoming in Fall 2025)
"Peirce, Bierstadt, and the Topographic Imagination in 19th-century America," The Art Bulletin (June 2021).
"Two Modes of Midcentury Iconology," History of Humanities vol.3, no.1, Spring 2018.
"Depicting Berkeleyan Idealism: a study of two portraits by John Smibert," Word & Image vol.33, no.1, March 2017.
‘Meyer Schapiro, Abstract Expressionism, and the Paradox of Freedom in Art Historical Description’, Tate Papers no.26 (Autumn 2016).
Book Chapters
"Albert Barnes, Bertrand Russell, and the place of aesthetics in the History of Western Philosophy," in Understanding through abstraction in science and art, edited by Chiara Ambrosio and Julia Sánchez-Dorado, in the series Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Routledge, New York, 2024.
"A Crucial Experiment: An Historical Interpretation of Edgar Wind’s ‘Hume and the Heroic Portrait,’" in Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment, edited by J. Anderson, B. Branca, and F. Tononi, Peter Lang Verlag, 2024.
Reviews
"What Do We Want From Our Entangled Pasts?" Third Text (Summer 2024).
"Revisiting David Summers’s Real Spaces: a neo-pragmatist interpretation," World Art vol.8, no.1 (January 2018).
