Wendy Bellion teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art history. She holds a B.A. in art history from Wesleyan University and an MA and PhD from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching takes a broad view of early American visual and material culture, exploring paintings, prints, photographs, and other media in relation to questions of vision, representation, science, gender, and political culture. Her book, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (forthcoming from UNC-Chapel Hill Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American Culture and History), examines the exhibition of trompe l'oeil paintings, optical devices, and illusionistic spectacles within the context of post-revolutionary anxieties about perception and deception. A new book project explores the relations between visual representation and political instability in the decade preceding the Revolutionary War. Her research on the art of Charles Willson Peale has been published in The Art Bulletin and American Art; her work also appears in New Media 1740-1915, Common-place.org, and several forthcoming anthologies on American art and material culture.
In 2008 Professor Bellion and Professor Monica Dominguez Torres collaborated on the organization of an international symposium supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, “Objects in Motion: Art and Material Culture across Colonial North America.” Papers from the symposium will appear in a forthcoming special issue of Winterthur Portfolio co-edited by Professors Bellion and Dominguez.
Professor Bellion taught at Rutgers University and the College of William and Mary before joining the University of Delaware in 2004. She has held fellowships at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Winterthur Museum, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and she has contributed to exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newberry Library, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She is a faculty affiliate in the Center for Material Culture Studies and the UD-Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.
In addition to teaching undergraduate surveys and seminars in American art, Professor Bellion has taught graduate seminars including:
“Vision and Virtuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain and North America”
“American Art: Historiography and Methods”
“Art and Revolution”
“Colonial Art across North America” (co-taught with Professor Dominguez)
“The Peales and Philadelphia”
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