Aaron Slodounik

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Aaron Slodounik, PhD, is an art historian who specializes in nineteenth-century European art, with a focus on France, and in the history of photography. This fall, he will teach Nonconforming Before Genderqueer, a seminar that studies art and literature from the 18th- to the 20th-century in Europe and America using trans as a framework. Last fall, Slodounik taught the course Reclaiming the Black Body in European Art at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College.  He is working on a manuscript entitled Savage Whiteness: Paul Gauguin and the Birth of Modernism, which investigates the making, sharing, and interpretation of objects and texts between Gauguin and his Symbolist peers.

Slodounik received his doctorate and a certificate in women’s studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the CUNY Graduate Center and the Van Gogh Museum. He has also received recognition for teaching excellence with a Learning and Leadership Grant from the NEA Foundation and a teaching prize from the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Recent Publications:

“Review of The Deaths of Henri Regnault, by Marc Gotlieb.” caa.reviews, December 11, 2017. https://doi.org/10.3202/caa.reviews.2017.190.

 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.