Profile
Ashley Lazevnick is the Faculty Research Support Officer in the College of Fine Arts and the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico. Her research investigates the intersections of art and literature, the history of science, and the medical humanities. Her first book, Fantasies of Precision, reconsiders a loose group of painters and writers, known as the Precisionists, through an examination of the meanings and metaphors associated with the term “precision” in the early twentieth century.
Prior to working at UNM, Ashley was Assistant Professor of Art History at Converse University in Spartanburg, South Carolina and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Florida (2020-2021) and Washington and Lee University (2019-2020). She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Phillips Collection (2018-2019) and was the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017-2018). Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Harry Ransom Center, and the Terra Foundation.
Selected Publications
“Dissecting ‘Mental Images’: Revisiting 20th-century Surgical Illustration,” Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, and Imogen Wiltshire (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Fantasies of Precision: Modern American Art, 1908-1947 (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).
“Giving the Virus a “Realistic Feel”: COVID-19 and the Rhetoric of Medical Models,” Visual Resources, special issue on The Visual Culture of a Virus, January 2022.
“‘Never Still!’ Nonhuman Life in Charles Demuth’s Green Pears,” Oxford Art Journal, August 2021.
“Precisionism—What’s in a Name?” Special issue of American Art, Spring 2019.
“Impossible Descriptions: Mina Loy and Constantin Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” Word & Image, special issue on ekphrasis, Spring 2013.