Jenny Tang

PRODiG+ Fellow

Areas of Specialization: Modern and Contemporary Art & Media, Black and Asian Diasporas, American Art History from a Decolonial Perspective, Global Histories of Race and Empire, Feminist Postcolonial Theories

Ph.D. Yale University
Email: Jenny.Tang@stonybrook.edu
Office: Staller Center for the Arts #4219

Jenny Tang (she/they) is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and media who specializes in Black and Asian global diasporas and in American art from a decolonial perspective. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the comparative analysis of race and gender, spanning across art history, media archaeology, visual and material culture, and ethnic and critical race studies. Her scholarship and pedagogy is committed to deconstructing power from a feminist postcolonial perspective.

She is currently interested in how changing regimes of law and state have intersected with art history, with an emphasis on borders, territoriality, mobility, and confinement. Her first book in progress examines how racialized laws of U.S. citizenship shaped twentieth-century art, the artist, and the history of art as a discipline. Research for this book has been supported by the College Art Association and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others. 

Prior to joining Stony Brook, Tang served as Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. From 2020-21, she was a Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. She has also worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other museums. Tang’s independent curatorial projects include New Genealogies (2016), co-curated with photographer John Edmonds at the Yale School of Art. 

Tang received her combined Ph.D. in the History of Art and Film & Media Studies from Yale University and her B.A. in History of Art from Williams College.