Wendy Katz

Wendy J. Katz is a professor of art history at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she is also a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the International Quilt Museum and a faculty member of Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Harris Center for Judaic Studies. She studies how the language of taste, as wielded by patrons, critics and artists to describe American art expresses moral and social values. Her research has focused on 17th-century Anglo-American portraits, 19th-century landscape, genre painting, and sculpture, and African-American art. She also has a website of nineteenth-century periodicals: https://katzsnewspapers.org/

Selected Publications

A True American: William Walcutt, Nativism, and Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).

Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press, New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology and Popular Culture, editor, University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

Lost Writers of the Plains, editor, NET Foundation, iBook, 2015. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/lost-writers-of-the-plains/id964353170?mt=11

Regionalism and the Humanities, ed. with Timothy Mahoney, University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Regionalism and Reform: Art & Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2002; paperback 2015.

“Introduction,” Thomas Kinkade (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2000) 9-34.

“Women and Art in the Passing Show,” in The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898: Art, Anthropology and Popular Culture, ed. Wendy Jean Katz (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) 105-160.

“Walt Whitman and “American” Art,” in Essays on the Study of English Language and Literature, ed. Huang Zongying (Changchun City, China: Jilin Publishing Group, 2011) 31-48.

“To bring forth good fruit: still-life painting and nationalism,” Poetical Fire, ed. Brandon Ruud. Sheldon Museum of Art, 2011; 10-19.

“Undocumented Art Criticism by Whitman in the New York Sunday Dispatch and New York Evening Post,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 32:4 (Spring 2015) 215-229.

“Robert S. Duncanson, Race, and Auguste Comte’s Positivism in Cincinnati,” American Studies, 53:1  (2014) 5-30.

“Early American Portraits:  Private to Public, Colonial to Republic,” Gilcrease Museum Journal, XVI: 2 (2008) 40-64.

“Fancy Painting, Street Children and the Fast Men of the Pavé,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, 21 (2007) 85-126.

“Portraits and the Production of the Civil Self in Seventeenth-Century Boston,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture, 39: 2/3 (2005) 101-128.

"The Art of Pleasing: Lilly Martin Spencer and Refinement,"American Studies. 42:1 (Spring 2001) 5-37.

"Robert S. Duncanson: City and Hinterland," Prospects, vol. 25 (October 2000) 311-335. 

"A Great Moral Discourse: Rembrandt Peale's The Court of Death,"Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 70:1/2 (1996) 14-25.