Pamela Lee

(Please note the following regarding graduate school: Lee will not be reviewing applications for PhD study in modern and contemporary art history for the entering fall 2027 cohort. In other words, she will not be accepting students interested in working in these fields.)

For questions about the graduate program in the Historry of Art, including requirements and the application, please consult the department’s “Red Book” or  contact the Director of Graduate Studies, Professor Nicola Suthor. 

B.A., Yale University
Ph.D., Harvard University
The Whitney Independent Study Program
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Pamela M. Lee teaches the history, theory and criticism of late modernism and contemporary art with research interests in the relationship between aesthetics, politics, war, time, technology and system. Her courses include lectures and seminars on Abstract Expressionism; the art of the 1960s; contemporary art and neoliberal globalization; feminism; methods and historiography; art and technology; modernism and war; and media cultures of the Cold War.

Professor Lee taught at Stanford University from 1997-2018, where she held the Osgood Hooker Professorship in Fine Arts. She has published six single-authored books including Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (2000); Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004); and Forgetting the Art World (2012). Her most recent book is Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, The Cold War and the Neoliberal Present (2020).

Lee is currently researching how the notion of “small war,” elaborated by theorists of the Napoleonic Wars, has been generalized within contemporary culture and finds expression outside regimes of martial spectacle: what the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz called the “theater of operation.” This transhistorical study considers a range of artists from the late 18th century to the present, including Francisco Goya, John Trumbull, William Giles Munson, An-My Lê, Kevin Beasley, Betye Saar, The Propeller Group, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Lucy Raven, Lin May Saeed, and others.

Lee is on the editorial board of OCTOBER, which she joined in 2018.

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

“The Practice of Everyday War,” and co-editor, “Special Issue: America at 250,” OCTOBER, No. 197, Summer 2026

“Tishan Hsu: Against the Prescient,” in Tishan Hsu (MAMCO and Secession: Geneva and Vienna, 2026)

Editor (with Michelle Kuo), “Generative and Adversarial: Art and the Prospects of AI,” OCTOBER, no. 189, Summer 2024