Anna Brzyski

Anna Brzyski joined the faculty of the Art Department at the University of Kentucky in 2003. She teaches courses in the 18th and 19th century European art, as well as theory, methodology, and criticism. She has taught courses on a broad range of topics, including visual culture, aesthetics, 19th century art, classicism, postmodernism, contemporary art, abstraction, and landscape.

Her research interests focus broadly on how value and legitimacy have been negotiated within particular artworlds and across artword meshworks and how particular paradigms of knowledge emerge and why they are maintained. Her dissertation (“Modern Art and Nationalism in Fin de Siècle Poland”) and the majority of her publications have dealt so far with Central/Eastern Europe and in particular Poland during the late 19th and early 20th century. Her work has appeared in Art Criticism, Centropa, 19th Century Art Worldwide, an anthology Art and National Identity at the Turn of the Century, edited by Michelle Facos and Sharon Hirsh (Cambridge 2003), and an anthology Local Strategies - International Ambitions. Modern Art and Central Europe, 1918-1968, edited by Vojtech Lehoda (Czech Academy of Sciences, forthcoming in 2005). She co-edited with Peter Chametzky a special issue of Centropa (September 2001) entitled “Modernism and Nationalism, Postmodernism and Postnationalism?” and is currently working on two book projects, an anthology Partisan Canons (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Art in the Age of Art History. Modernism, Nationalism and Legitimacy in 19th Century Europe.

Prof. Brzyski is also the project director and compiler of the Polish Art Archive, a digital database of primary source materials pertaining to Polish art, a project funded by Southern Illinois University and the US Department of Educations. She is also the designer and the site manager of the HGCEA website (Historians of German & Central European Art & Architecture). She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the ArtWorlds Press.