Evan Neely

Evan Neely received his PhD from Columbia University in 2010 and has been Assistant Chair of the History of Art and Design Department since 2015. His recent book, Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825-1878 (Routledge 2024), analyzes how the aesthetics of landscape representation shaped and rationalized practices of colonization in the northeastern United States, and, more broadly, how nascent theories of ecology were influenced by the intellectual configurations that emerged on this site. He is currently at work on two projects. The first, tentatively titled The Iconography of New York City, will be a book-length analysis of the moral geography of his home city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, treating figures as various as the novelist Wiliam Dean Howells, the painter Eliza Pratt Greatorex, and the architect and collector, Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. The second is a series of articles on the influence that debates about notation and modality among logicians at the turn of the twentieth century had on early notions of the meaning of abstract art; this will include discussions of the exchanges between Bertrand Russell and Roger Fry, the failure of Charles Sanders Peirce to have his existential graphs accepted by the mainstream of logical thought, and the impact of Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism, rather than his actual physical theories, on Cubism. 

Since coming to Pratt, he has designed several courses: Ecology, Activism, and the Image of Nature; Art of the United States, 1776-1945; A History of New York Architecture; and Painting in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1930-1980. As well, he has contributed to and was previously chair of the committee to redesign Art Since the Sixties.

B.F.A. Fine Arts, Parsons The New School of Design; M.Phil., M.A., Ph.D. Art History, Columbia University.

Book:

Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825-1878 (Routledge 2024)