2025 Stephen and Sandra Glass Annual Humanities Lecture with Erika Doss

Erika Doss, a prolific scholar in Art History and American Studies, will present the Glass Lecture at Pitzer on Tuesday, April 15 at 4:15 p.m. in Benson Auditorium. 

Professor Doss’s wide-ranging research has focused on the complexities of modern and contemporary American visual and material cultures including the nature of representation and issues of history, memory, and identity—national, cultural, and self. She is, since 2023, Distinguished Chair in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has previously held faculty positions at Cleveland State University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Notre Dame.

She is author of several books, including: 

• Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (University of Chicago Press, 1991)
• Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995)
• Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (University Press of Kansas, 1999)
• Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
• American Art of the 20th–21st Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

For the Glass lecture, Professor Doss will be speaking on her current book project, Monuments are Mortal: Public Art, Permanence, and Cultural Vandalism.