Alexander Nemerov teaches and writes about American visual culture from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, focusing on painting, sculpture, photography, and film. His most recent book is To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, published in 2011, the catalogue to the exhibition he curated for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is also the author of Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War, published in 2010, about a single night’s performance of Macbeth attended by Abraham Lincoln in Washington in 1863. He is the author of a book on film—Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (2005)—and two books on painting, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (2001), and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (1995). In 2011-12 he is teaching a graduate seminar on the 1930s in America, and an introductory survey of the history of Western art from the Renaissance to the present.

Selected Publications
“The Madness of Art: Georgia O'Keeffe and Virginia Woolf,” Art History (2011)

To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (Yale University Press, 2011)

“When Did Art Become Meaningless?: Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave,” The Yale Review 99 (April 2011): 94-103

Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (University of California Press, 2010)

“Seeing Ghosts: The Turn of the Screw and Art History,” in What Is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter (Williamstown, Mass.: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008): 13-32

“Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” American Art 22 (Fall 2008): 50-71

“Whitman's Moment,” PN Review 176 (Summer 2007): 30-33

“Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era,” in Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006)

“The Boy in Bed: The Scene of Reading in N. C. Wyeth’s Wreck of the ‘Covenant’,” Art Bulletin 88 (March 2006): 7-27

Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story (Stockbridge, Mass.: Norman Rockwell Museum, 2006)

Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005)

“The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 780-810

“Coming Home in 1945: Reading Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell,” American Art 18 (Summer 2004): 58-79

“The Dark Cat: Arthur Putnam and a Fragment of Night,” American Art 16 (Spring 2002): 36-59

The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (University of California Press, 2001)

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