Jennifer Van Horn

Jennifer Van Horn is a scholar who works at the intersection of art history, history, and material culture study. She investigates artworks’ and artifacts’ active role in forming individual and collective identities, in the past and the present. 

Her writing and teaching disrupt and expand traditional narratives about “early” American art and America’s past. Her scholarship makes room for the stories of previously overlooked users and makers: an enslaved man of African descent grinding pigments for a portrait; an elite white woman applying cosmetics at her dressing table; a Revolutionary War veteran amputee donning a prosthesis; an enslaved Black seamstress modifying a chintz gown to articulate her own aesthetic.

An associate professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware, Jennifer contributes to ongoing conversations within and beyond the academy about race and representation, enslavement and materiality, gender and power, disability and making, the legacies of slavery, and the reparative possibilities of material culture study. Her most recent book, Portraits of Resistance Activating Art During Slavery, published by Yale University Press, centers the complex entanglements between enslaved Americans of African origin and descent and the painted portrait. The book recovers portraiture as a site for enslaved people’s creativity and resistance in the 18^th and 19^th-century United States.