Caroline A. Jones

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Caroline A. Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. She is a professor of art history in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A curator and essayist, she has published Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2006), Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and other works.

Jones’s current research into globalism looks at how art functions in world’s fairs, national pavilions, and biennial culture. The resulting book will return scholarly focus to the work of art; that is, how art operates differently when it is in the context of a global assemblage, with alternating claims of universalism and national identity put into play. In parallel, Jones investigates how the artist becomes subject to these global discourses.

Jones received her AB from Harvard University and her MA/PhD from Stanford University. She has been a fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, and the Wissenschaftskolleg and Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Jones has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities awards, and her films and exhibitions have appeared at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Arts in Tokyo, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.