Alexander Nemerov: Biography

Alexander Nemerov is Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, he was a professor in the department of the history of art at Yale University (2001‒2012). A scholar of American art, he writes about the presence of art, the recollection of the past, and the importance of the humanities in our lives today. He is the author of Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (2016), Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov (2015), Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (2013), Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010), Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (2005), The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (2001), and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (1995). He has curated exhibitions including To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2011). Among Professor Nemerov’s recent essays are meditations on Charles Burchfield, Winslow Homer, Dennis Miller Bunker, Helen Frankenthaler, Joe Rosenthal, Gregory Crewdson, Danny Lyon, William Eggleston, and Grandma Moses. His new book, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, American Mystic, will appear in spring 2017.