Profile

Laura Gelfand received her PhD in Art History from Case Western Reserve University in 1994 after earning an MA from Williams College and a BA from SUNY at Stony Brook in Art History. Before coming to Utah State University, where she is now Emeritus Professor, she served for two years as the Associate Dean of the Honors College at The University of Akron where she joined the faculty in 1997 and was promoted to Professor in 2005.

At Utah State University she served as Head of the Department of Art & Design from 2011-2018. Gelfand spent much of 2018-19 as a Fulbright Scholar in the History of Art Department at the University of York. She currently lives in York where her status as an Honorary Professor at the University of York and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society will allow her to continue to research representations of dogs in British Art.

Research

Informed by art historical methods, her research engages the vibrant, interdisciplinary world of animal studies with a particular focus on canids. In addition to an essay on Hogarth and his close connection with his pug dog, Trump, Gelfand is completing a book on portraits that include dogs in major British collections.

Publications

• Edited the frequently-cited volume Our Dogs, Our Selves: Dogs in Medieval and Renaissance Art, Literature and Culture (Brill, 2016).
• Essay, “The Wolf at the Door and the Dog at our Feet,” appeared in Home Cultures: Special Issue on Animals and Home in 2021.
• Contributed a chapter on “Human-Animal Interactions and Art,” to The Handbook on Human-Animal Interactions, Interventions and Anthrozoology (Routledge, 2023).
• Published “A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: James McNeill Whistler, The White Girl, and the Animal(s) in Question” in Humanimalia in 2023.
• In addition, the collection she co-edited with Angela Bartram (Derby Univ.), Punk and the Animal: Ethos, Ethics, and Aesthetics, will be published by Intellect in 2026. She is also co-editor, together with Sarah Blick (Kenyon College), of the series Art and Material Culture in Europe (Brill), which includes over 30 books.