Faculty Directory - Bio
Christopher Reed
Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture
Contact:
214 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone:
cgr11@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Chris Reed is on leave at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the academic year 2007-08.
Christopher Reed holds a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University. His interdisciplinary scholarship explores a wide range of topics in visual culture. He has published on topics as diverse as mass-produced paintings for interior decoration, street furniture designed to mark a gay neighborhood in Chicago, the relationship of British Vogue to emerging forms of queer culture in the 1920s, and (with Christopher Castiglia) the television show Will & Grace.
Reed’s primary scholarly focus has been on the Bloomsbury group. He has published on Roger Fry’s aesthetic theories of formalism, on their relationship to Viriginia Woolf’s textual experimentation, on Bloomsbury’s relationship to its Victorian forebears, and, most extensively, in his book Bloomsbury Rooms (Yale, 1996), on how the domestic spaces created by the Bloomsbury artists relate to the lives and work they contained.
Reed’s edited volumes include A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago, 1996) and Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. He is currently involved in organizing an exhibition of Bloomsbury art in American collections, and is researching a new project concerning constructions of Occidental forms of masculinity through attitudes toward Japanese art and design.
Books
- [with Arthur H. Miller] Lake Forest College: A Guide to the Campus [edited volume of writings by faculty and my students, funded by the Graham Foundation], Lake Forest College, 2007.
- Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity, Yale University Press, 2004. Shortlisted for 2005 Modernist Studies Book Prize; Winner 2005 Historians of British Art prize for single-author book on a topic after 1800.
- A Roger Fry Reader [critical anthology], University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture [edited collection], Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Articles and Booklets
- Difficult Pleasures: The Art of Karen Lebergott. Lake Forest College, 2007.
“Design for [Queer] Living: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Décor in British Vogue, 1922 - 1926,” GLQ 12 (3), 2006, 377-404.
- “A Vogue That Dare not Speak its Name: Sexual Subculture during the Editorship of Dorothy Todd, 1922-26,” Fashion Theory 10 (1/2), 2006, 39-72.
- [with Christopher Castiglia] “Ah, yes, I remember it well: Gay Memory in Will & Grace,” commissioned by Gay Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAAD), Cultural Critique 56, Winter 2004, 158-88; rpt. Television: The Critical View, Horace Newcomb, ed., Oxford University Press, 2006; Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life, Karen Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins, eds., Sage, 2006.
- “We’re From Oz: Marking Ethnic and Sexual Identity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21 (4), August 2003, 425-440; revised as “A Third Chicago School?”, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, Katerina Rae Reudi and Charles Waldheim, eds., University of Chicago Press, 2005.
- “Domestic Disturbances: Challenging the Anti-domestic Modern,” in Contemporary Art and the Home, Colin Painter, ed., Oxford: Berg, 2002, 35-53.
- "A Tale of Two Countries," Charleston 22, Autumn/Winter 2000, 35-39.
- "Domestic Strife," Tate 21 [Tate Modern Special Issue], 2000, 51-54.
- "Roger Fry: Art and Life," Charleston 20, Autumn/Winter 1999, 10-17; rpt. in special Bloomsbury issue of Cahiers Victoriens and édouardiens 62, October 2005.
- Roger Fry's Durbins: A House and its Meanings, Bloomsbury Heritage series, Cecil Woolf Publishers, 1999.
- [with Diane Dillon] "Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant," Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1), Spring 1998, 39-51.
- "Imminent Domain: Queer Space in the Built Environment," Art Journal 55 (4), Winter 1996, 64-70.
- "Post-modernism and the Art of Identity," Concepts of Modern Art, 3rd ed., Nicos Stangos, ed., Thames & Hudson, 1994, 271-93.
- "Making History: The Bloomsbury Group's Construction of Aesthetic and Sexual Identity," Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, Whitney Davis, ed., Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Press, 1994; simultaneously released as double issue of The Journal of Homosexuality 27 (1/2), 1994, 189-224.
- "Through Formalism: Feminism and Virginia Woolf's Relation to Bloomsbury Aesthetics," Twentieth Century Literature 38 (1), Spring 1992, 20-43; rpt. in The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf, Diane F. Gillespie, ed., University of Missouri Press, 1993.
- "Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties," Genders 11, Fall 1991, 58-80; abridged as "Critics to the Left of Us, Critics to the Right of Us," Charleston 12, Autumn/Winter 1995; revised as "The Mouse that Roared: Creating a Queer Forster," Queer Forster, Robert K. Martin and George Piggford, eds. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
- "The Roger Fry Collection at the Courtauld Galleries," Burlington Magazine, November 1990, 766-72.
- "Apples: 46 Gordon Square," Charleston Newsletter 23, June 1989, 20-24.
- "The Artist and The Other: The Work of Winslow Homer," Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 42 (1) F, Spring 1989, 68-79.
- "'Off the Wall and onto the Couch!' Sofa Art and the Avant-Garde Analyzed," Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Winter 1988, 33-43.
Recent Invited Talks
- “Bachelor Japanists,” Southern Illinois University, 2 February 2007; University of Wisconsin, Madison, 22 March 2007.
- “’The young would say, Todd lets you write what you like’: British Vogue in the Twenties,” plenary lecture, 16th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Birmingham, U.K., 23 June 2006.
- “The Queer Modernity of British Vogue, 1922-1926,” Yale University, 11 October 2005.
- “From Hammersmith to Bloomsbury: William Morris’s Fractious Heirs,” Northwestern University, 12 February 2005.
- “Rooms of her Own: Decorations by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for Virginia Woolf’s 52 Tavistock Square,” University of Massachusetts at Lowell, 17 October 2005.
- “Is a Calla Lilly ever just a Calla Lilly: Abstraction and Symbolism in the Era of Georgia O’Keeffe,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 2 March 2003.
- “Design for (Queer) Living: The ‘Amusing Style’ in 1920s London,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1 November 2002; Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M, 1 April 2006; Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, 7 May 2007.
- “Bloomsbury’s Post-War Interiors: An Aesthetic of Conscientious Objection Duke University, 31 October 2002; Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 15 November 2002; Keio University, Tokyo, 15 May 2003; Charleston, Sussex [UK], 27 June 2004.
- "Reservations on the Uncanny: Surrealism and Domesticity," Stieren Arts Enrichment Lecture, Trinity University [San Antonio], 23 October 2000.
- "The Anti-Domestic," Tate Gallery, 4 February 2000.
Recent Selected Presentations
- “Brahmin Fantasies: Japanese Collections in Boston,” College Art Association, New York, 16 February 2007.
- “The Queer Modernity of British Vogue, 1922-1926,” College Art Association, Atlanta, 18 February 2005.
- “The (A)Political Reputation of Formalism in Modern and Postmodern Art Criticism, or, Why I Can’t Read the New Yorker Anymore,” Modernist Studies Association conference, 22 October 2004.
- “Rooms of her Own: Decorations by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for Virginia Woolf’s 52 Tavistock Square,” 14th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, London, 24 June 2004.
- “Bloomsbury’s Post-War Interiors: An Aesthetic of Conscientious Objection,” College Art Association, Philadelphia, 21 February, 2002.
Honors, Grants, and Awards
- Andrew Oliver Research Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, August, 2007.
- Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History, University of Memphis, 2002-03.
- J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995-96.
- University of Pennsylvania Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1994-95.
- Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, 1989-90.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art Theodore Rousseau Fellowship in Connoisseurship, to catalog the Roger Fry Collection, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London, 1987-88.
Links to Selected Articles
Castiglia, Christopher
Reed, Christopher
"Ah yes, I remember it well": Memory and Queer Culture in Will and Grace Cultural Critique - 56, Winter 2004, pp. 158-188
Dillon, Diane
Reed, Christopher 1961-
Looking and Difference in the Abstract Portraits of Charles Demuth and Duncan Grant
The Yale Journal of Criticism - Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1998, pp. 39-51
Reed, Christopher 1961-
Design for (Queer) Living: Sexual Identity, Performance, and Decor in British Vogue, 1922-1926
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies - Volume 12, Number 3, 2006, pp. 377-403
