Jae Emerling

Jae Emerling is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Art & Art History at UNC Charlotte and the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Arts + Architecture. 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 Critical Inquiry, History of Photography, Radical Philosophy, and the Journal of Art Historiography. His latest book Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History (2024) 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 (Royal College of Art, London) a collection of essays tentatively titled Reinventing Theory: Art History and Criticism (forthcoming 2025, Edinburgh University Press), with contributions from Tim Ingold, Emmanuel Alloa, Mieke Bal, Whitney Davis, Georges Didi-Huberman, John Rachjman, Shigemi Inaga, Zainab Bahrani, Parul Dave Mukherji, Ali Behdad, Homi Bhabha, Stephen Melville, and others. Emerling is also Editor-at-Large for the London-based Journal of Visual Culture: 

For a full list of scholarly works, see https://uncc.academia.edu/JaeEmerling