Profile

Rachael Z. DeLue is the Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art at Princeton University and the director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative. She is jointly appointed in the Effron Center for the Study of America, and she is associated faculty in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and the Program in Media and Modernity. DeLue specializes in the history of American and transatlantic art and visual culture, focusing on intersections among art, science, and the history and theory of knowledge and on the transnational and transcultural formation of “America” as a contested geography, identity and idea. Published work includes George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2004), Landscape Theory (2008, co-edited with James Elkins), Picturing (2016), and Arthur Dove: Always Connect (2016). Other publications consider the French painter Camille Pissarro, Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled, Romare Bearden’s collages, Darwin and the visual arts, the relationship between art writing and medical diagnosis in the United States circa 1900, shoreline landscapes as symbols of empire, the supernatural in American art, constructions of Native America within Anglo-American archaeology in the early republic, and the life and times of snowy owls.

DeLue was the Reviews Editor for The Art Bulletin from 2012 to 2015 and, for six years, served on the editorial board of the journal American Art. Currently, she serves on the advisory board of the Archives of American Art Journal. 

Professor DeLue holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Before coming to Princeton, she taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She grew up in Portland, Oregon.

Current Research

Current projects include essays on climate and form and landscape vision and a book, Impossible Images and the Perils of Picturing, that considers the many ways that image-makers in Europe and the United States from a range of disciplines, including the sciences, have endeavored to create pictures of ideas, entities, or phenomena that should be impossible to depict.

Teaching Interests

At Princeton, DeLue offers courses on a wide range of topics, and her courses always include visits to area museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History, as well as Princeton’s own art museum. She co-taught an undergraduate course with Professor Nathan Arrington that introduced students to the history of Princeton during the Revolutionary War through the survey and excavation of the Princeton Battlefield. A graduate seminar, “Terrains of Knowledge,” included a trip to the Great Salt Lake, Utah, to explore Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Most recently, she has offered courses on the theory and methodology of art history, art and knowledge in the nineteenth century, art and politics in the United States, the visual and material culture of natural history, and the role of fiction in visualization in the arts and sciences.