Profile

Biography

Donald Preziosi is Emeritus Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at UCLA and a former Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Born in New York City, he was educated at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in art history, and has taught at several American universities including Yale and MIT, where he developed a doctoral program in the history, theory and criticism of art and architecture. He has lectured widely in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, China, Turkey, and Egypt. In 2007 and 2008 he was the MacGeorge Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Melbourne, and in Fall 2010 visiting professor at Bosphorus (Bogazici) University in Istanbul, inaugurating a new doctoral program in art history supported by the Getty Foundation. He is the author of a dozen books on art and architectural history, critical theory, and the historiography of cultural institutions, including Architecture, Language and Meaning; Aegean Art & Architecture (Oxford); Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (Yale); In the Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics; Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (The 2001 Slade Lectures at Oxford). His The Art of Art History (Oxford; 2nd ed. 2009) is the most widely used introduction to the historiography of the discipline in English, and appears in Chinese translation Fall 2011. He is co-author with Claire Farago of Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Ashgate). His newest books are Art is Not What You Think it Is, with Claire Farago, in the Blackwell Manifestos Series (Fall 2011), and Enchanted Credulities: Art, Religion, and Amnesia, forthcoming from Routledge in 2012.