Wanda M. Corn

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Wanda M. Corn is a cultural historian of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American visual culture. She is particularly interested in issues of gender and the relationship between popular and fine arts. Having written on American tonalism and regionalism, she looks at the rise of a transatlantic modernism after World War I in her most recent study, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (University of California Press, 1999). She is also completing a book about Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of murals and sculptures for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

At Radcliffe, Corn will research a museum exhibition and catalog on “Gertrude Stein and the Making of the Modern.” The exhibition will focus on Stein’s relationship with American artists, photographers, writers, and musicians and on the impact of Stein’s theories and practice of modern portraiture.

Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD in art history from New York University and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Regents, and the Stanford Humanities Center. She was a member of the advisory board for the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné project and has served on the board of directors of the College Art Association and on the commission of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She presently serves on the boards of the Terra Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.