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Lisa Uddin is a teacher-scholar of visual culture and the built environment. She focuses on how visual and architectural practices in the lands known as the United States have shaped racial formations, migration, and settler colonialism. She is the author of (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), essays and reviews in U.S. art and architectural history, Environmental Studies, and Black Studies, and co-editor of the online art criticism series, Black One Shot. Her current book project examines Black visual archives of Western U.S. settlement. 

Before coming to Whitman, Uddin taught art history at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and held postdoctoral fellowships in Environment, Culture, and Sustainability at the University of Minnesota and at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She received her doctorate in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and her research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, ³Ô¹ÏÍø, among others.

Education

Ph.D. Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
2009

M.A. Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
2006

M.A. Media Studies
Concordia University-Montréal
2002

B.A. North American Studies
McGill University
1996

Courses Taught by Professor Uddin

• Politics of Photography 
• Architectures of Race
• Critical Art History
• Mayhem, Machines, Manifestos: Modernism in Art and Architecture
• Blackness and the Arts
• Indigenous Aesthetics: Native North American Art and Visual Culture
• Senior Seminar in Art History

Professor Uddin is the author of (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which examines the shift from “naked cages” to naturalistic enclosures in U.S. zoos of 1960s and 70s. Reading architectural designs, institutional histories and popular zoo media, the book situates global wildlife conservation within the racial and spatial logics of U.S. urban renewal. Uddin shows how the material and symbolic emergence of endangered species displays in and around American zoos unfolded as the resurgence of white anti-urbanism in the long postwar period. Reviewers praised the book as a “surprising perspective on urban and racial issues” (Planning Magazine) that “adds a new dimension to what has become the standard historical understanding of zoos' relationship to race and empire” (Buildings and Landscapes) and “helps us to see zoos, and cities more widely, as multispecies environments, where humans and animals came together to shape the contours of urban life.” (Journal of American Studies). Research materials for this book are now housed at the .

Prof. Uddin also co-edited with Michael B. Gillespie (NYU) , an online art criticism series devoted to blackness and the arts. Launched in 2018, and written by leading and emerging scholars and curators of black visual and expressive culture, the series consisted of 85 pieces over 21 transmissions. Essays had a 1000 word limit and each were devoted to a single work of art, broadly conceived. Contributors resisted the pressures to formulate complex discussions of blackness for easy public consumption by making creative-critical space for its often speculative, ambivalent, and irreconcilable forms.

Her current research, "Out Black in the Settler West," follows contemporary African diasporic visual practices and their negotiations with the settler colonial architectures and landscapes of "Out West." She is also collaborating to make visual and performance art that examines states and potentials of embodiment in the course of malignancy.

“The Fugitivity of Black Panther Oakland,” in , eds. Greg Castillo and Lee Stickells (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press).

, eds. Lisa Uddin and Michael Boyce Gillespie, ASAP/J, 2018-2022. 

“And Thus Not Glowing Brightly: Noah Purifoy’s Junk Modernism,” in , eds. Mabel O. Wilson, Irene Cheng, Charles Davis. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

“,” ASAP/J, February 13, 2020. 

,” ASAP/J, August 13, 2018.

“," Los Angeles Review of Books, January 7, 2016.  

, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

2019, Louis B. Perry Faculty-Student Summer Research Scholarship, ³Ô¹ÏÍø 

2018, Paul Garrett Fellowship for excellence in research, teaching and service, ³Ô¹ÏÍø 

2017, Getty Library Research Grant, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA 

2017, Sally Ann Abshire award for faculty-student research, ³Ô¹ÏÍø

2012, Corcoran College of Art and Design Faculty Development Research Grant 

2009, Quadrant Fellowship in Environment, Culture and Sustainability, University of Minnesota, MN 

2008-09, Pembroke Postdoctoral Fellowship, Brown University, Providence RI 

2007, Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington DC 

2007, Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, Garden Club of America and Landscape Architecture Foundation

2004, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender & Women’s Studies, Graduate Research Grant 

2004, University of Rochester, Celeste Hughes Bishop Award for academic accomplishments, teaching achievements, and general contributions 

2002-06, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Doctoral Fellowship 

2002-04, Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, Québec, Doctoral Fellowship