Temple University

Erin Pauwels is an historian of American art and visual culture with special interest in photography, media theory and ecocriticism. Her research explores portraiture and identity formation, celebrity culture, and intersections between theater and the visual arts. 

Her first book, Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York, recontextualizes the legacy of a prominent nineteenth-century artist to reveal how the emergence of mass media and celebrity culture reshaped traditional definitions of art and artistic authorship. Other publications include articles on portraiture and indigenous sovereignty; the hybrid media operations of painted photographic backdrops;  migrant experience; the hybrid media operations of painted photographic backdrops; and the changing meanings of photography in the context of social media. Her work appears in the journals American Art, Panorama, History & Technology, as well as edited volumes such as Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (University of California Press, 2020) and Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture (Smithsonian Institution, 2018).

Pauwels has received grants and fellowships in support of her research from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Huntington Library. She was awarded a Jay and Deborah Last Research Fellowship in American Visual Culture from the American Antiquarian Society, and was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. Pauwels is an elected member of the Print Council of America.
 
PhD, Art History and American Studies, Indiana University, 2015
MA, Humanities and Social Thought, New York University, 2008

Selected Works

Pauwels, E. (2024). Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.

Pauwels, E. (2024). "From Inauguration Crowds to Capitol Mobs: Photography and Fact in the Post-Truth Era," in G. Hamming and N. Phillips (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1800-1950. New York: Routledge.

Pauwels, E. (2024). "Network Artistry and Viral Reproduction in Antebellum Sheet Music Illustration," in T. Leininger-Miller and K. Hartvigsen (eds.), A Century of US Illustrated Sheet Music, 1830-1930. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Pauwels, E. (2020). José María Mora and the Migrant Surround in American Portrait Photography.
     Panorama: Journal of the Historians of American Art 6(2).

Pauwels, E. (2020). The Art of Not Posing: Napoleon Sarony and the Popularization of Pictorial
     Photography. In John Rohrbach (Ed.), Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of American
     Photography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Pauwels, E. (2018a). Let Me Take Your Head: Photographic Portraiture and the Gilded Age Celebrity
     Image. In W. W. Reaves (ed.), Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture (pp. 136–155).
     London, UK: The Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery in association with D Giles
     Limited.
 
Pauwels, E. (2018b). Backdrop of East Lynne: Charles Demuth’s Dramatic Abstraction. American Art
     32(3), 86–95.
 
Pauwels, E. (2015). Resetting the Camera’s Clock: Sarony, Muybridge and the Aesthetics of
     Wet-Plate Photography. History & Technology: An International Journal 31(4), 482–491.
     doi:10.1080/07341512.2015.1090674