Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Associate Professor of American Art. She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University and then held an appointment as an assistant professor of History of Art and African and African American Studies at Harvard University for five years before joining before coming to the University of Pennsylvania in September 2005. During that time she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation. Her first book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, was published by Duke University Press in the winter of 2004. Her most recent project, a museum exhibition and catalog, titled Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, was organized with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts before traveling to the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington and the Long Beach Art Museum in California in 2006-07. Professor Shaw continues to be interested in studying issues of race, gender, sexuality and class in American art and is currently working on a book about such confluences in popular illustration and early film.
Early film and African American Cinema
History of Art