Elizabeth Otto
Associate Professor
Graduate Coordinator, Art History MA
Professor Otto teaches courses on European and American art and visual culture from the nineteenth-century to the present, issues of gender and theory, and the history of photography.
EDUCATION
Ph.D., the History of Art (with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies), the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
M.A., Art History, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
B.A., Art History, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
RESEARCH
Otto is currently working on a book titled Haunted Bauhaus: Sprit and Body in the Home of Rationalized Culture, which challenges conventional understandings of the Bauhaus, interwar Europe’s most influential art institution. This is the first sustained investigation of the Bauhaus’s ongoing engagement with the body in relation to spiritualism and the occult, gender and figuration, and the Surreal in order to explain the embrace of the irrational which lurks beneath the sleek surfaces and cold structures most commonly associated with the school.
PUBLICATIONS
Books
The New Woman International: Photographic Representations, from the 1870s through the 1960s. Co-edited with Vanessa Rocco and with a foreword by Linda Nochlin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.
Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt. Berlin: the Bauhaus-Archiv and Jovis Verlag, 2005.
Articles (Selected)
“Landscapes of Escape: Marianne Brandt’s Painting and Photography during the National Socialist Period.” History of Photography, forthcoming Spring 2013.
“Real Men Wear Uniforms: Photomontage, Postcards, and Military Visual Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany.” Contemporaneity 2 (2012), 26 pp.
“Siegfried Kracauer’s Two Art Histories.” Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer. Eds. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012, 128-48.
“Image as Investigation: Sciences of the Otherworldly at the Bauhaus.” The Environmentalist 32 (May, 2012).
“Paris—Dessau: Marianne Brandt’s New Women in Photomontage and Photography, from Garçonne to Bauhaus Constructivist.” The New Woman International (see above), 153-171.
“Introduction: Imagining and Embodying New Womanhood” (co-author with Vanessa Rocco). The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film, 1870s-1930s. Eds. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, forthcoming Feb. 2011, 1-17.
“The Secret History of Photomontage: On the Origins of the Composite Form and the Weimar Photomontages of Marianne Brandt.” Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s. Eds. Kerstin Barndt, Kathleen Canning, and Kristin McGuire. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 66-92.
“Schaulust: Sexuality and Trauma in Conrad Veidt’s Masculine Masquerades.” The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Ed. Christian Rogowski. Suffolk, U.K.: Camden House, 2010, 135-152.
“A ‘Schooling of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt.” New German Critique 107: Summer, 2009, 89-131.
“Designing Men: New Visions of Masculinity in the Photomontages of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy.” Bauhaus Construct: the Object of Discourse. Eds. Robin Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik. New York: Routledge: 2009, 183-204.
“On the ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Strong’ Sexes at the Bauhaus: Marianne Brandt, Gender, and Photomontage,” The Bauhaus: a Conceptual Model[German version: “Über das ‘schöne’ und das ‘ starke’ Geschlecht am Bauhaus: Marianne Brandt, Gender und Fotomotage,” Modell Bauhaus]. Eds. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009, 291-294.
“Montage and Message: the Photography-Based Works of Alice Lex-Nerlinger in Publications of the Weimar Republic.” Printed Matter: Fotografie im/und Buch. Ed. Barbara Lange. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag: 2004, 57-77.
“Memories of Bilitis: Marie Laurencin beyond the Cubist Context.” Genders 36 (Fall 2002).
CURATORIAL WORK
“Visual Epistemologies,” the Anderson Gallery, University at Buffalo, Fall 2011 (with Gary Nickard).
“Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt,” shown at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, Germany; the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University; and the International Center of Photography, New York. 2005-06.
AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
Otto is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center, and the SUNY Conversations in the Disciplines program. At the University at Buffalo, her awards include a Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Institute and a Research Award from the Gender Institute. Her 2011 “International New Woman” Conference was funded in part by a SUNY Conversations in the Disciplines grant.
Courses
- AHI 251 Introduction to Modern Art
- AHI 380 Image and Gender
- AHI 592 Bauhaus
- AHI 594 Gender in Weimar Culture and Theory
- VS 590 Theories of Montage
Read course descriptions in the Undergraduate Catalog-AHI and on the Graduate Courses page
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