Margaret Olin

Margaret Olin (Leadership Team, Project Cycle II) is a Senior Research Scholar with appointments at Yale Divinity School as well as the Department of Religious Studies, the Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of the History of Art. From 1986 until her arrival at Yale in 2009 she was professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies. She is the author of Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (Penn State Press, 1992), The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses in Jewish Art (University of Nebraska, 2001), and Touching Photographs (University of Chicago, 2012). She is also co-editor, with Robert S. Nelson, of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (University of Chicago Press, 2003), and, with Steven Fine and Maya Balakirsky-Katz co-edits the journal Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture. Over time, she has built a hybrid scholarly and photographic practice. Her photographs have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Israel, and the United States, and in 2012 at Yale University, she curated the multi-venue exhibition Shaping Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv. Her recent work includes a study of photography and imagination and several ongoing projects on visual culture and photographic practices in Israel and Palestine. Some of these projects can be followed on the blog and website touchingphotographs.com.