Jane M Blocker

Affiliations
- Art History
- Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
- Liberal Arts: Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities
Office Hours - Spring 2020
By appointment only
Dr. Jane Blocker is a specialist in contemporary art and critical theory. She offers courses such as Art and the Environment, Art Since 1945, Contemporary Art, Alternative Media: Video, Performance, and Digital Art, as well as courses on gender and sexuality, and 20th century theory and criticism.
Broadly speaking, her research seeks to understand the nature of history, particularly as it is practiced relative to the contemporary. Her work has examined performance art as a curious object of art historical study, one that troubles traditional understandings of memory, the archive, witness, and the body. It has also taken up questions of history's biases and exclusions, its assumptions and blind spots, as well as the ethics of historiographic practice, and the historian or witness as a privileged subject position. Her most recent work examines the problem of the contemporary for history.