PhD, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

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About

Jessica Stark's research focuses on modern African art and the global histories of photography. Her current book project examines the photographs Anne Fischer (1914-1986), a German-Jewish refugee to Cape Town, produced in South Africa in the decade leading up to apartheid and in England following the Afrikaner Nationalists’ rise to power. Through close attention to Fischer's images and their circulation, Stark explores how this young Weimar woman mobilized German modernist aesthetics in her new colonial context and considers how her gendered experiences of exile inflected the work she later produced in London. The first monograph on Fischer, her project demonstrates how South African art histories, although historically sidelined in narratives of art, have had significant implications for the development of new transnational modernisms in Africa and Europe.

Stark’s research engages the intersections of modernist, feminist, and leftist histories and has been generously supported by the Peter E. Palmquist Foundation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Fulbright Program, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program, and Harvard University. She is currently the McCormick Postdoctoral Research Associate in the History of Photography and a Lecturer in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.

Portrait of Anne Fischer, ca. 1935-6.
Anne Fischer, ca. 1935-36.

Selected publications

2023

“From Hamburg to Cape Town: The Denizen Photography of Else and Helmuth Hausmann.”

In Urban Exile: Theories, Methods, Research Practices, edited by Burcu Dogramaci, Marieke Hetschold, Laura Karp Lugo, and Helen Roth, 601-631. Bristol: Intellect, 2023.

2020

Cover of October journal issue 173.

“A Pariah Among Parvenus: Anne Fischer and the Politics of South Africa’s New Realism(s)”

October 173 (Summer 2020): 143-175.

2020

Cover of Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges.

“A Working Woman’s Eye: Anne Fischer and the South African Photography of Weimar Women in Exile.”

In Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges, edited by Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo, and Kylie Thomas, 23-44. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.

2018

Cover of Analog Culture: Printer’s Proofs from the Schneider/Erdman Photography Lab, 1981-2001.

“Printing and the Urgency of Translation: Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, and the Task of Schneider/Erdman, Inc.”

In Analog Culture: Printer’s Proofs from the Schneider/Erdman Photography Lab, 1981-2001, edited by Jennifer Quick, 38-63. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Art Museums, 2018.

2017

VoCA Journal - Jessica Williams and Gary Schneider.

“Building, Performing, and Translating the Negative: The Working Relationships of Schneider/Erdman, Inc.”

Jessica Williams and Gary Schneider, VoCA Journal. Web-based publication.

Curriculum Vitae

Current position

2022 - 2024

McCormick Postdoctoral Research Associate in the History of Photography and Lecturer, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University

Education

2022

PhD, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

2016

MA, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

2013

MA, Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland-College Park

2010

BA with Honors, English, Art History and Criticism, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Fellowships, grants and awards

2021 - 2022

Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

2021

Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University, Derek Book Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard College Office of Undergraduate Education

2021

Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research Grant for "The Exilic Photography of Etel Mittag-Fodor (1905-2005)"

2019 - 2020

Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of African Art, Washington, D. C.

2018 - 2019

Fulbright Research Award, Cape Town, South Africa

2017 - 2018

Arthur Kingsley Porter Traveling Fellowship, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

2017

Graduate Society Summer Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

2017

Graduate Student Council Conference Grant, Harvard University

2016

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) for Advanced study of Zulu, Cape Town, South Africa

2013

Graduate Fellowship in Nigerian Visual Art and Culture for Non-Nigerian Scholars at Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF), Lagos, Nigeria

2013

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS) for Intermediate study of Zulu, Durban, South Africa

2011

Robert H. and Clarice Smith Doctoral Fellowship, Art History and Archaeology Department, University of Maryland-College Park

Selected talks and participation in conferences and colloquia

2023

Symposium Co-organizer (with Josie Johnson, Katherine Bussard, Caroline Riley, and Patricia Hayes) of Photography’s Frameworks, a three-day virtual symposium jointly convened by the Photography Network and the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

2023

“Anne Fischer: South African Photographies of Exile and Resistance.” Geographies, Spaces of Experience, and Objects of Migration in Jewish Visual and Material Culture, workshop held by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut.

2023

“Photography Against Apartheid: Anne Fischer, Dora Taylor, and the Vale of Grace.” Work in Progress Talk, Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University.

2022

“Etel Mittag-Fodor: Architectural Photography, South African Modernism, and the Fabrication of Race." Intersecting Photographies Symposium convened by the Photography Network, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

2022

“Anne Fischer: South African Photography and the Politics of a Failed Photobook.” A Radical Lens: Global Perspectives on the New Woman Behind the Camera, virtual symposium convened by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

2021

“Käthe Kollwitz and the South African Left.” Art Talk Live, given as part of the Harvard Art Museums’ larger ReFrame initiative.

2021

“Denizen Photography: The Postmigrant Work of Else and Helmuth Hausmann.” Urban Exile: Placemaking and Belonging, online symposium held by METROMOD, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München, Germany.

2020

“From Berlin to Cape Town: New Realism and the South African Photography of Anne Fischer,” A Foreign Eye: Interwar European Photographers Abroad, Association for Art History’s (AAH) 46th Annual Conference, Newcastle University & Northumbria University, England. (Conference canceled due to COVID-19)

2019

“The Path to Apartheid: Anne Fischer, Constance Stuart Larrabee, and the Politics of South Africa’s New Realism(s).” Women Photographers Lecture Series, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.

2018

“Langa in a Hard, Merciless Light: A Working Woman’s Eye and an Early Documentary Ethos, 1937-1941.” Center for African Studies Graduate Student Colloquium, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

2018

“An Unsentimental Lens: Anne Fischer and the South African Photography of a Weimar Woman in Exile.” Indexing Transformation: Interventions in Critical Knowledge Production in South Africa, hosted by the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

2017

“Boring Pictures of Uninteresting Things: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers. The Politics of Abstract and Conceptual African and African Diasporic Art, Panel Chair, The Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) 17th Triennial Symposium on African Art, University of Ghana.

2016

“Whitfield Lovell’s Servilis: Photography and the African American Women’s Club Movement.” The Art Of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes symposium, hosted by the Hutchins Center in correspondence with the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University.

2015

Discussant, Nandipha Mntambo’s The Flight, an original performance commissioned for and debuted at the third event in Harvard University’s Black History/Art History lecture and performance series.

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