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Melody Barnett Deusner

Office: Kresge 3-400
m-deusner@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Melody Barnett Deusner (Ph.D. Art History, University of Delaware), specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, with particular emphasis on the study of American painting and mass culture in an international context. Her doctoral dissertation, "A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons, 1870–1914," probed the startling convergence between the pursuit of an art for art's sake—which promotes the activity of selection, arrangement, and the orchestration of harmonious visual effects as the true substance of picture-making—and the organizational imperatives of systems management and network building in the political and corporate spheres in turn-of-the-century Britain and America.

Her abiding interest in the visual culture of communities, from stock certificates to club exhibitions, continues to inform her current scholarship. Other areas of focus include the international reception of American art and the evolution (and intersection) of private, corporate, and museum collections in the United States. Her research has been sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Luce Foundation/ACLS, the Kress Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with ongoing support provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.