Graduate Student
Brianne Cohen
Advisor(s): Terry Smith
Brianne Cohen works on contemporary art and critical theory. She is in her sixth year at the University of Pittsburgh, finishing her dissertation, "Contested Collectivities: Europe Reimagined by Contemporary Artists," which explores politically-charged contemporary artistic practices such as those of Harun Farocki, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Henry VIII's Wives that attempt to imagine collectivities in response to a number of political imperatives including the tide of anti-immigrant policy, violence, and rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe. With a DAAD Research Scholarship in 2009-10, she was able to spend a year in Berlin to conduct research for her dissertation.
Education
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 2006-present
Ph.D. in progress, ABD status, Art History. Contemporary Art and Critical Theory.
Dissertation: "Contested Collectivities: Europe Reimagined by Contemporary Artists."
Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom, 2004-2005
M.A., Art History. Contemporary British Art.
Thesis: “Thomas Hirschhorn: Making Art Politically.” Adviser: Julian Stallabrass.
Thesis Distinction.
Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 2000-2004
B.A., Art History.
Thesis: “Clouding the Clock-Face: Contemporary Art of Chuck Close, Sophie Calle, and Brooke Singer.”
Reader: Jennifer Friedlander.
Cum Laude.
Louisa Moseley Fine Arts Prize, awarded for best senior thesis in art history.
Selected Publications
“Harun Farocki: Raising the Stakes of the Game,” in Art&Education, ed. Danna Vajda (Jan 2012).
“Farocki’s In-Formation: Silent Statistics and Stereotypes,” in Athanor XXIX, ed. Allys Palladino-Craig. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, 2011.
"Cai Guo-Qiang's Explosion Events as Performances of Planetarity," in Negotiating Difference: Chinese Contemporary Art in the Global Context. Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch, Birgit Hopfener, Franziska Koch, and Juliane Noth, eds. Berlin: Freie Üniversität, 2011 (forthcoming).
"Thomas Hirschhorn's Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress: Imagining Alternative Forms of Political Affiliation," in Crossing the Boundaries XVI: Trading Spaces. Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University, 2008.
Selected Awards
CAA Professional Development Fellowship in Art History, Honorable Mention, 2011
Art&Education Papers Prize, Honorable Mention, for "Raising the Stakes of the Game," 2011
Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, 2010-11
Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund, The Pittsburgh Foundation, summer 2010
DAAD Graduate Scholarship, Berlin, 2009-10
Arts and Sciences Graduate Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2008-09
Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, for language study in Austria and France, summers 2008 and 2007
Austrian Room Committee Scholarship, University of Pittsburgh, summer 2008
Provost’s Humanities Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2006-2007
Selected Conferences
“Charged Counterpublics: Mediating Strangers in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bijlmer Spinoza Festival.” To be presented in July 2012, Nuremberg, Germany. 33rd Congress of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA)
“Thomas Hirschhorn: Parodying the Topography of a Swiss ‘Imagined Community’”
November 2011, 67th SECAC Conference, Savannah, Georgia
“Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bijlmer Spinoza Festival: Untethering Banlieue Stereotypes”
October 2011, Media Acts, 10th NorSIS International Conference, Trondheim, Norway
“Thomas Hirschhorn: The Artist as Political Actor”
January 2011, “The Role and Practice of Artists in Society” Graduate Student Symposium, The Art History Society of California State University, Los Angeles
“Farocki’s In-Formation: Silent Statistics and Stereotypes”
October 2010, 28th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Florida State University
“Monuments to Subjectivity in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Interdisciplinary Installations”
June 2010, Displaying Word and Image, AIWIS/AIERTI, University of Ulster, Belfast, United Kingdom
“Cai Guo-Qiang’s Fireworks: Igniting a Paranational Landscape.”
October 2009, Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context, Freie Üniversität and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany
“Farocki’s Deep Play: Gambling on Spectatorship.”
March 2009, Chance: The 25th Annual Boston University Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art, Boston University, Boston, MA
