Erika Doss

Erika Doss is professor emerita at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught in the Department of American Studies from 2007-2023. She previously taught at Carleton College, Cleveland State University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her wide-ranging interests in modern and contemporary American visual and material cultures are reflected in the breadth of her publications, including the books Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991, which received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995), Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999), Looking at Life Magazine (editor, 2001), The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials (2008), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), American Art of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries (2017), Monumental Troubles: Rethinking What Monuments Mean Today (editor, 2018), and Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth Century American Artists and Religion (2023). The recipient of several Fulbright awards, Doss held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her favorite classes at Notre Dame included “American Ruins,” “Death in America” and “Protest: American Cultures of Dissent.