Lisa Uddin

uddinlm@whitman.edu
Olin Hall 121
509-527-4964
Curriculum Vitae

Lisa Uddin is a teacher-scholar of visual culture and the built environment. She focuses on how visual and architectural practices in the lands known as the United States have produced racial, migrant and settler colonial ways of knowing and being. Her work moves within the disciplines of modern and contemporary art and architectural history, Visual Culture Studies and Black Studies. She is also engaged in a longstanding conversation with Environmental Studies that generated her first book on the whiteness of American zoo reform.

Born in suburban Toronto to Swedish and Bengali immigrant parents, and shaped by artists, architects, and community radio broadcasters in urban Montreal, Uddin writes and teaches from her position as a settler of color who now lives in the homelands of Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla people and in solidarity with migrants worldwide. Her current book project examines Black visual archives of Western U.S. settlement.

Before coming to Whitman, Uddin taught art history at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and held postdoctoral fellowships in Environment, Culture, and Sustainability at the University of Minnesota and at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She received her doctorate in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and her research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, among others.

Education

Ph.D. Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
2009

M.A. Visual and Cultural Studies
University of Rochester
2006

M.A. Media Studies
Concordia University-Montréal
2002

B.A. North American Studies
McGill University
1996

Courses Taught by Professor Uddin

Photographing Difference
Architectures of Race
Critical Art History
Mayhem, Machines, Manifestos: Modernism in Art and Architecture
Blackness and the Arts
Indigenous Aesthetics: Native North American Art and Visual Culture
Senior Seminar in Art History

Professor Uddin is the author of Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which examines the shift from “naked cages” to naturalistic enclosures in U.S. zoos of 1960s and 70s. Reading architectural designs, institutional histories and popular zoo media, the book situates global wildlife conservation within the racial and spatial logics of U.S. urban renewal. Uddin shows how the material and symbolic emergence of endangered species displays in and around American zoos unfolded as the resurgence of white anti-urbanism in the long postwar period. Reviewers praised the book as a “surprising perspective on urban and racial issues” (Planning Magazine) that “adds a new dimension to what has become the standard historical understanding of zoos' relationship to race and empire” (Buildings and Landscapes) and “helps us to see zoos, and cities more widely, as multispecies environments, where humans and animals came together to shape the contours of urban life.” (Journal of American Studies). Research materials for this book are now housed at the Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

Prof. Uddin also co-edited with Michael B. Gillespie (NYU) Black One Shot, an online art criticism series devoted to blackness and the arts. Launched in 2018, and written by leading and emerging scholars and curators of black visual and expressive culture, the series consisted of 85 pieces over 21 transmissions. Essays had a 1000 word limit and each were devoted to a single work of art, broadly conceived. Contributors resisted the pressures to formulate complex discussions of blackness for easy public consumption by making creative-critical space for its often speculative, ambivalent, and irreconcilable forms.

Her current research follows Black migrant space making through visual archives of Western U.S. settlement. Moving across diasporic histories of making space "out West,” in television, film, sculpture, and museums, her study considers how forms of blackness re-world settler colonial architecture and landscapes.

“The Fugitivity of Black Panther Oakland,” in Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture, eds. Greg Castillo and Lee Stickells (forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press).

Black One Shot, eds. Lisa Uddin and Michael Boyce Gillespie, ASAP/J, 2018-2022.

“And Thus Not Glowing Brightly: Noah Purifoy’s Junk Modernism,” in Race and Modern Architecture, eds. Mabel O. Wilson, Irene Cheng, Charles Davis. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020.

“Radical Shit: Countercultural Autonomy and Composting Toilet Design,” ASAP/J, February 13, 2020.

“Thumper’s Descent,” ASAP/J, August 13, 2018.

“The Matter of Black Life," Los Angeles Review of Books, January 7, 2016.

Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

2019, Louis B. Perry Faculty-Student Summer Research Scholarship, Whitman College

2018, Paul Garrett Fellowship for excellence in research, teaching and service, Whitman College

2017, Getty Library Research Grant, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA

2017, Sally Ann Abshire award for faculty-student research, Whitman College

2012, Corcoran College of Art and Design Faculty Development Research Grant

2009, Quadrant Fellowship in Environment, Culture and Sustainability, University of Minnesota, MN

2008-09, Pembroke Postdoctoral Fellowship, Brown University, Providence RI

2007, Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington DC

2007, Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, Garden Club of America and Landscape Architecture Foundation

2004, Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender & Women’s Studies, Graduate Research Grant

2004, University of Rochester, Celeste Hughes Bishop Award for academic accomplishments, teaching achievements, and general contributions

2002-06, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Doctoral Fellowship

2002-04, Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture, Québec, Doctoral Fellowship