Associate Professor
Matthew C. Hunter researches visual art and architecture of the long eighteenth century (ca. 1660-1860), with particular emphasis on their interactions with science and technology. A recovering artist, Hunter is currently working on entanglements of Anglo-American art with insurance. He is interested in liberalism, artists’ self-help organizations, genealogies of research-creation, histories of redlining, problems of color, and matters related to art-historical knowledge production (i.e. methods).
His publications includeĚýPainting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography and the Temporally Evolving Chemical ObjectĚý(University of Chicago Press, 2020) andĚýWicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration LondonĚý(University of Chicago Press, 2013). An editor ofĚýGrey Room, he has co-editedĚýThe Clever ObjectĚý(Wiley, 2013) andĚýBeyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and ScienceĚý(Springer, 2010), along with special issues on liquid intelligence, the aerial image, and art’s actuarial imagination. His work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Fonds de recherche du QuĂ©bec–SociĂ©tĂ© et Culture, among others. For more information, please see:Ěý
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Some Recent Publications
“The Sun is God: Turner, Angerstein and Insurance,”ĚýOxford Art JournalĚýVol. 47, Iss. 1 (June 2024): 39-65
“Art and the Actuarial Imagination: Propositions,”ĚýOxford Art JournalĚýVol. 47, Iss. 1 (June 2024): 1-12; co-authored with Avigail Moss
“Nicholas Barbon’sĚýDe febre ardente: Medico-Philosophical Grounds of Fire Insurance?”ĚýGrey RoomĚý95 (Spring 2024): 74-89; co-authored with Mackenzie Zalin
“” in “Beyond Copyright: How does Law Impact Art?” colloquium, ed. Wendy Katz and Lauren van Haaften-Schick,ĚýPanorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American ArtĚý9, no. 1 (Spring 2023)
“Editors’ Introduction: The Aerial Image”,ĚýGrey RoomĚý83 (Spring 2021): 6-23; with Emily Doucet and Nicholas Robbins
“Modeling: A Secret History of Following,” inĚý, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 45-70
Course Offerings and Supervision
Hunter’s teaching aims to integrate analysis of visual artifacts with broader historical, theoretical and interpretive problems. Hunter welcomes students at the M.A. and Ph.D. level who are interested in projects relating to art and science, expanded histories of photography, landscape broadly conceived, and the arts of the Atlantic world. Some recent seminars offered include “Risk” (with Prof. Alex Blue V, Winter 2024), “Drawing for Art Historians” (Winter 2023), “Art Under Liberalism” (Fall 2022), and “Risk, Value, Accident: Art and the Actuarial Imagination” (Fall 2021).
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