Erin Pauwels is an historian of modern and contemporary art in the Americas whose work examines photography and ecocritical approaches to visual culture. Her research explores the politics of portraiture and placemaking, technologies of image dissemination, and the intersections between theater and the visual arts.
Her first book, Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York (Penn State University Press, 2024), reconstructs the lost legacy of a once-famous nineteenth-century artist to reveal how the emergence of mass media reshaped definitions of artistic authorship alongside the material reach of visual imagery.
She is currently completing a new book manuscript exploring how nineteenth-century photographers deliberately staged images to misrepresent Native American presence in the U.S. West and how contemporary Indigenous artists are critically reappropriating and actively unsettling the damaging legacy of this earlier photographic era.
Her published work appears in the journals Panorama, American Art, and History & Technology, as well as in edited volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Art and Challenges to Empire (Routledge, 2026), and Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020).
Pauwels’s research has earned support from prominent funding institutions including the Huntington Research Library, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Harry Ransom Center, the American Antiquarian Society, the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. Pauwels is a member of the Photography Network, the Association of Historians of American Art, and the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.