Sean Kramer

As a Teaching Assistant Professor in Art History and Museum Studies, I get to combine my two passions: working with students and thinking critically about museum histories and practices. My curatorial career has centered on the special role academic museums play as a "front-door" to the university, a connecting space that makes research visible and accessible for diverse audiences of students, faculty, staff, and the public more broadly. I have long been interested in the ways museums foster a sense of welcoming, how they navigate difficult social and political terrain, and in exploring queer methodologies in museum protocols and processes.

My research to date comprises a blend of scholarly and curatorial projects, which range chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the present. Threads of gender, power, and violence connect these various endeavors. I am currently transforming my dissertation into a book manuscript: Picturing the Common Soldier: Manhood, Trauma, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Europe offers a reevaluation of the genre of military painting as it experienced a revitalization in French and British art and culture in the decades following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, a period marked by social and political upheaval, sweeping military reforms, and intensifying globalization through imperial expansion. My curatorial projects have explored analogous concerns in varying contexts. Irreplaceable You: Personhood and Dignity in Art, 1980s to Now (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2025), brought together twenty-seven contemporary artists whose work reflects on our relationships to imagery of conflict, suffering, and dispossession, doing so through diverse visual and conceptual means that resist the spectacularization and commodification of violence. “The Book of Two Hemispheres:” Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the United States and Europe (Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2024) examined the dynamic and highly varied forms of visual culture that arose on both sides of the Atlantic in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular though controversial antislavery novel.  I am finishing work on a long-term reinstallation of the gallery of late nineteenth-century European and American art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, I was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA). There, I oversaw curricular engagement with the Museum, leading class visits and fostering relationships with faculty from over thirty College departments while organizing exhibitions. I have also held curatorial, research, and public experience positions at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan; the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan; and the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.