Matthew Johnston

Matt Johnston studies the history of modern visual culture, in particular the nineteenth century and popular media such as photography and print. A focus of his work has been exploring how print publications in many discourses used landscape images to motivate the expansion and development of the United States. In an era before film, such publications relied on inventive, sometimes pre-cinematic orchestrations of viewing and reading in order to make their claims more convincing. Other scholarly interests include changing relationships between “high art” and popular media, the role of illustration in the development of such sciences as geology and ethnology, and the impact of photomechanical processes in the early twentieth century. Publications in progress include “‘The Printed Page Has Superseded the Market-Place’: Gilded Age Business Practices and the Rack Pictures of John Frederick Peto” and “‘Scarce a Dozen Steps Will Take Us Where We Need to Go’: Utilizing the Halftone in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives.” Matt also serves on the board of trustees of the Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, WA.

Academic Credentials

PhD 2004, MA 1994 University of Chicago, BA 1992 Yale University

Teaching

Art 100 Key Monuments and Ideas in the History of Art

Art 201 Modern European Art

Art 207 Ancient Art of the Americas

Art 235 History of the Print and Print Workshop

Art 303 Realism, Photography, and Print Culture in the 19th Century

Art 319 Modern Architecture

Art 401 Art After 1945

Art 451 Special Topics in Art History (Race in American Art; Colonial Art in the Americas; Visual Culture of Business, Advertising, and Work)

Art 493 Senior Seminar: Practices of Art History

Research

• “The Landscape of Prehistory: Mesa Verde and the Framing of the Past in American Archaeology,” Textes et Contextes (July 2022)

• “Constructions of Native Spirituality in Adolph Bandelier’s Ethnological Research in the Southwest,” De/Colonización en las Américas: Cambios y continuidades / De/Colonization in the Americas: Continuity and Change (International Association of Inter-American Studies, 2020)

• “Inventing a National Past: Archaeological Investigation of the Southwest after the US-Mexican War,” Inventing Destiny: Cultural Explorations of US Expansion (University Press of Kansas, 2019)

• Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century (Oklahoma University Press, 2016)

• “Pre-Columbian civilisation as cultural patrimony: archaeology and nationalism at the world’s fairs,” Civilisation and Nineteenth-Century Art (Manchester University Press, 2016) 

• Book Review: Katherine Roeder, Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay, College Literature 42:1 (Winter 2015)

• “Hamlin Garland’s Detour into Art Criticism: Forecasting the Triumph of Popular Culture over Populism at the End of the Frontier,” The Journal of American Culture 34:4 (December 2011)

• “National Spectacle from the Boat and the Train: Molding Perceptions of History in American Scenic Guides of the Nineteenth Century,” University of Toronto Quarterly 73:4 (Fall 2004)