Director of Graduate Studies; History of Art & Architecture,
Associate Professor; American Art
he/him/his
| Fall 2025 Office Hours | |
|---|---|
| rcb@bu.edu | TBA |
Professor Barrett is a scholar of American art and visual culture from the colonial period to the early twentieth century. His research and teaching explore the ways that fine artists navigated the political, economic, and environmental transformations associated with modernization, including the emergence of liberal democracy, the expansion of industrial and finance capitalism, the privatization and development of the North American continent, climate change, and the rise of fossil fuels. He is the author of Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art (California, 2014) and Speculative Landscapes: American Art and Real Estate in the Nineteenth Century (California 2022) and co-editor, with Daniel Worden, of Oil Culture (Minnesota, 2014). He is currently at work on a new book project that will explore the ways that artists, writers, and everyday creators reckoned with the experience and memory of Atlantic hurricanes during the long nineteenth century. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize and NCSA Emerging Scholars Award, and has published essays in The Art Bulletin, American Art, Winterthur Portfolio, Journal of American Studies, and Prospects. Professor Barrett teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in colonial, nineteenth-century, and early twentieth-century American art and visual culture. Topics include colonial American art, art of the American Revolution, art and the Civil War, American Art and the Atlantic Ocean, the visual culture of American cities, Picturing the Frontier, American landscape art, American modernisms, and American art in the 1940s.


