Wendy Bellion
Wendy Bellion
Professor of Art History
Office: 318 Old College
Biography
Professor Wendy Bellion (Ph.D. Northwestern University) teaches North American art history. Professor Bellion's scholarship takes an interdisciplinary approach to American visual and material culture, focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States and exploring American art within the cultural geographies of the British Atlantic world and early modern Americas. She has served as the Terra Foundation of American Art Visiting Professor in Paris, and she has held research fellowships with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
Her current research includes projects about the Peale family, the visual culture of the Chestnut Street Theatre, and a co-edited volume about iconoclasm across the early Americas (with Mónica Domínguez Torres and Jennifer Van Horn). A co-edited special issue about “Revolution” is forthcoming in Journal18 (spring 2026).
Her recent publications include Material Cultures in the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (2023, with co-editor Kristel Smentek; Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019); Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which won the Smithsonian’s 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship; and Objects in Motion: Art and Material Culture across Colonial North America (Winterthur Portfolio, 2011, with co-editor Mónica Domínguez Torres). She is a frequent podcast guest, appearing recently on Thing4Things and Worlds Turned Upside Down.
Professor Bellion is a past Director of the University’s Center for Material Culture Studies and has served as Associate Dean for the Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences. She is currently a member of the American Antiquarian Society’s Advisory Council and will be the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at the Clark Art Institute/Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art during 2027-28.
