Biography

Professor Jennifer Van Horn is a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-century art and visual and material culture, with an emphasis on the early United States, in particular the regions of the mid-Atlantic and South. Her inter-disciplinary courses encompass artworks, artifacts, and landscapes, material culture theories and methodologies, museum studies, and the reparative possibilities of material culture study. She teaches and advises on topics that include: materiality and enslavement; sensory histories; disability art histories; race and representation; gender and power.

She is currently writing a book about racialized sensory histories of heat and cold in the early United States, for which she was awarded a Winterthur Museum & Library NEH Fellowship as well as a George Washington Presidential Library Fellowship. An essay from that project was published in Journal18 on racialized thermoception and enslaved African American’s insurgence at Mount Vernon. She is also at work on a second book project about disability and making, as well as co-editing two volumes: Iconoclasm Across the Americas and The Disabled Gaze: Multi-Sensory Perspectives of Art, Bodies, and Objects.

Her latest book, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (Yale University Press, 2022), centers the complex entanglements between enslaved Americans of African origin and descent and the painted portrait. The book recovers portraiture as a site for enslaved people’s creativity and resistance in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States. You can read an interview about the book in Journal18 here. This project was supported by fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019, she received the National Portrait Gallery's Director's Essay Prize for a piece of this project published in The Art Bulletin.

Van Horn’s other publications include her first book The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Omohundro Institute, University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and essays (including co-authored works) in The Art Bulletin, American Art, Early American Studies, Panorama, Winterthur Portfolio, West 86th. She has guest co-edited a special issue of Winterthur Portfolio (Enslavement and its Legacies), and a Commentaries for American Art (Disabilities and American Art Histories).

A graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (M.A.), and the University of Delaware (Honors B.A. History and Art History), Van Horn received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before joining the University of Delaware, she served as an assistant curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and taught at George Mason University and with the Smithsonian M.A. Program in the History of Decorative Arts.

Van Horn has served on the editorial boards for The Art Bulletin and the University of Delaware Press and as president of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA), 2023-2026.

For further information about her writing, research, and teaching philosophy see Van Horn’s personal website.