Nancy Anderson
Assistant Professor
Dr. Nancy Anderson (PhD, History of Art, University of Michigan) has received numerous fellowships and grants in her area of research of scientific imaging within visual culture. These include UB Humanities Institute Fellow, William H. Morton Senior Research Fellow with the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College, and Walther Rathenau Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Most recently, she is the Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. Dr. Anderson has published and lectured prolifically across the U.S., Canada, Germany, England, Italy, Switzerland and Austria. She is currently completing her book The Scale of the Event: Art/Science/Image, 1945-1970, and has an upcoming co-edited anthology The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences.
My research focuses on issues related to scientific imaging, scientific imaging technologies, modern theories of vision, 20th century scientism and visual culture, and artist-scientist collaboration. As I noted in a review essay, “Eye and Image: Looking at a Visual Studies of Science” (Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 2009), there is now a clear field one can call a “visual studies of science,” and it is being pursued across various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. With this visual studies of science (which is were I place my work), there are four specific topics on which I focus: 1) scientific images and visualizing technologies as evidence and pedagogical tools, with emphases on methods and ethics of imaging; 2) space, time, geometry, scale and modeling practices in the emergence of molecular biology in the post WWII period; 3) the implementation of architectural models in theorizing molecular conformation as well as the use of molecular models and forms in late modern architecture and theories of urban planning; and 3) artist-scientist collaborations.
Courses
- VS 400/VS 500- Topics in Visual Studies Buckminster Fuller
- VS 500 Topics in Visual Studies -Modern Vision- Visuality
- VS 534 Body Criticism
- VS 625 Instant Image- Snapshot to Telepresence
Read course descriptions in the Undergraduate Catalog-VS and on the Graduate Courses page
