Associate Professor
Matthew C. Hunter researches visual art and architecture of the long eighteenth century (ca. 1660-1860), with particular emphasis on their interactions with science and technology. A recovering artist, Hunter is currently working on entanglements of Anglo-American art with insurance. He is interested in liberalism, artists’ self-help organizations, genealogies of research-creation, histories of redlining, problems of color, and matters related to art-historical knowledge production (i.e. methods).
His publications include Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (University of Chicago Press, 2013). An editor of Grey Room, he has co-edited The Clever Object (Wiley, 2013) and Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science (Springer, 2010), along with special issues on liquid intelligence, the aerial image, and art’s actuarial imagination. His work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et Culture, among others. For more information, please see: http://sites.google.com/site/matthewhuntersite/
Some Recent Publications
“The Sun is God: Turner, Angerstein and Insurance,” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 47, Iss. 1 (June 2024): 39-65
“Art and the Actuarial Imagination: Propositions,” Oxford Art Journal Vol. 47, Iss. 1 (June 2024): 1-12; co-authored with Avigail Moss
“Nicholas Barbon’s De febre ardente: Medico-Philosophical Grounds of Fire Insurance?” Grey Room 95 (Spring 2024): 74-89; co-authored with Mackenzie Zalin
“Insurance: Beyond Law?” in “Beyond Copyright: How does Law Impact Art?” colloquium, ed. Wendy Katz and Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 9, no. 1 (Spring 2023)
“Editors’ Introduction: The Aerial Image”, Grey Room 83 (Spring 2021): 6-23; with Emily Doucet and Nicholas Robbins
“Modeling: A Secret History of Following,” in Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 45-70
Course Offerings and Supervision
Hunter’s teaching aims to integrate analysis of visual artifacts with broader historical, theoretical and interpretive problems. Hunter welcomes students at the M.A. and Ph.D. level who are interested in projects relating to art and science, expanded histories of photography, landscape broadly conceived, and the arts of the Atlantic world. Some recent seminars offered include “Risk” (with Prof. Alex Blue V, Winter 2024), “Drawing for Art Historians” (Winter 2023), “Art Under Liberalism” (Fall 2022), and “Risk, Value, Accident: Art and the Actuarial Imagination” (Fall 2021).