ERIN PAUWELS, Ph.D.

Erin Pauwels is an historian of American art with special interest in photography and media theory. Her research explores the intersections between elite and popular forms of visual culture as a way of understanding the politics of public visibility in the Americas and the threads of continuity that tie historic analogue media to contemporary digital technologies for reproducing, circulating, and consuming images.​

Her book, Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York, will be published by the Pennsylvania State University Press in 2023. It offers the first comprehensive biography of an eccentric American artist named Napoleon Sarony, whose complex legacy and personal fame revolutionized the art and business of photography during the late nineteenth century. Sarony's dramatically staged portraits of Gilded Age celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain (among many others) were reproduced by the tens of thousands, marking a new chapter in the public life of photography and inextricably binding the medium to the rise of celebrity culture. 

Pauwels has published widely on photography and the rise of celebrity culture in the Americas. Other recent work includes articles on photographer José María Mora and Cuban-US migrant experience; the hybrid media operations of painted photographic backdrops; and the entangled histories of theater, early film, and fine art. Her work appears in the journals American Art, Panorama, History & Technology, as well as in recent books such as the National Portrait Gallery’s 50th-Anniversary volume, Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture (Smithsonian Institution, 2018), and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020).

Dr. Pauwels is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University.