Research Bio

Margaretta Lovell, professor of Art History and American Studies, holds the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Chair in American Art. Her research concerns interdisciplinary questions involving the arts in what is now the United States, mobilizing visual artifacts to answer cultural, social, political, and economic questions. Author of essays on Wayne Thiebaud, food photography, and prizewinning books Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (2005), and A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists 1860-1915 (1989), her most recent book, Painting the Inhabited Landscape: Fitz H. Lane and the Global Reach of Antebellum America (2023), concerns a painter who captured New England’s ecological relationship to fish, granite, and forests as well as its links to China, Puerto Rico, California, and Surinam. 

Current research projects include a book on the transatlantic Gilded Age’s artists and architects whose work critiqued the dominant culture; an essay on the global peregrinations of two Copley paintings in the wake of tragedy in Scotland; and a biography of an African-American seamstress born in 1799. As an advocate for public art history she teaches museum curatorship and object-based learning. As an advocate for place-based public history she is currently documenting, with cohorts of students and community volunteers, two residential Berkeley neighborhoods—one an historically non-white Redlined neighborhood and the other designed to embrace nature.

Research Expertise and Interest

cultural history, American art, architecture, design, Public art history