Jae Emerling

Jae Emerling is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the College of Arts & Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. After attending Wesleyan University, he received his Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.  He is the author of Theory for Art History (2005, second edition 2019) and Photography: History and Theory (2012), both published by Routledge.  His work has also appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, History of Photography, Radical Philosophy, CAA Reviews, and the Journal of Art Historiography. See https://uncc.academia.edu/JaeEmerling His latest book Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History (2023) performs a transdisciplinary philosophy of aesthetic history via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cy Twombly, Marina Abramović, Paul Celan, Cecil Taylor, Italo Calvino, Candida Höfer, and others by focusing on the artistic and historiographic labor of art – a mode of creation whose vitality and epistemic significance is always anachronistic and futural. He is coediting with Kamini Vellodi (University of Edinburgh) a collection of essays tentatively titled Inventions of Theory, with contributions from Mieke Bal, James Elkins, Whitney Davis, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Rachjman, Shigemi Inaga, Zainab Bahrani, Parul Dave Mukherji, Ali Behdad, Jean-Michel Rabate, Homi Bhabha, Stephen Melville, Hammam Aldouri and others. Emerling is also an editor of the the London-based Journal of Visual Culture: https://www.journalofvisualculture.org/magazine/

Some of his recent publications include:
“Vivre sa vie pour JLG,” Journal of Visual Culture 21.2 (December 2022).

“Relays, Signals, Actuality: A Return to Focillon,” Journal of Art Historiography 27 (December 2022):
https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2022/11/emerling-rev.pdf

“Deleuze and Us,” Journal of Visual Culture 19.3 (2020).

“Image-Intensity Complex, or Art History: Review of Kamini Vellodi, Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze,
Diagrammatics, and Art History,” Art History 44.4 (Spring 2021): 890-893.

“Forces and Forms: Theories and Methods in the History of Photography,” The Handbook of
Photography Studies, edited by Gil Pasternak, London: Bloomsbury, 2020: 97-113.

“Theses on the Concept of Research,” What is Artistic Research? Charting A Field in Expansion, edited
by Paulo de Assis and Lucia D’Errico, London: Rowan & Littlefield, 2020: 12-26.

“A Contemporary Agamben?” Radical Philosophy 2.04 (February 2019): 93-97.