Barbara Maria Stafford
Contact Information
bms6@uchicago.edu
Ph.D.. University of Chicago - William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor - Taking the long perspective, my research has charted the polyopticalities, or multiple means of spatial presentation, characterizing the early modern period up to and including the contemporary era of electronic media. While always working at the intersection of the imaging arts, the visualizing sciences, and performance technologies, I have now expanded my intense focus on the body and embodied experience. My recent essays examine the revolutionary ways in which the brain sciences are changing our view of the total sensorium and inflecting our fundamental assumptions concerning perception, sensation, emotion, mental imagery, and subjectivity. I am currently engaged in writing a cognitive history of images.
Selected Publications
- Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, (University of Chicago Press, May 2007).
- Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2001-02 (co-curator).
- Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity, (contributor as member of the Committee on Information Technology and Creativity), eds. William J. Mitchell, Alan S. Inouye, and Marjory S. Blumenthal, (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 2003).
- Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).
- Good Looking. Essays on the Virtue of Images, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996).
- Artful Science. Enlightenment, Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
- Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991).
- Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984).
Recent Projects
- Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, (University of Chicago Press, May 2007).
For more information: http://home.uchicago.edu/~bms6/