James Michael Levinsohn

PhD Candidate
james.levinsohn@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Modern/Contemporary
  • European
  • Aesthetics
  • Art Historiography
  • Photography
  • Queer theory

Areas of Interest

  • History, theory, and criticism of photography
  • Photography as contemporary art (post-1960)
  • Documentary photography
  • Realism after modernism
  • German modern/contemporary art
  • Theories of space, embodiment, sensoriality, and subjectivity
  • Psychoanalysis and its legacy
  • Postmodernism and postmodernity
  • Urbanism and urban space
  • Vernacular photography
  • Gender/sexuality, esp. sexual minority cultures 

Working Dissertation

Title

Realism Beyond Redemption: Wolfgang Tillmans and Photography after Postmodernism

Supervisors

Louis Kaplan
Alison Syme
Jordan Bear

Biography

James M. Levinsohn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Broadly speaking, his research focuses on figurative realism's persistence in photography and other media over the course of the twentieth century in Europe and North America, particularly when its deployment has reflected new historical conditions of sexuality, subjectivity, and urban space. He holds a BA in Art History with Honours from the University of Chicago (2012) and an MA in Art History from Rutgers University (2017). He has held curatorial positions at the Roman Vishniac Archive of the International Center of Photography (ICP), Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum and taught a variety of undergraduate courses at Rutgers and the University of Toronto.

Selected Publications

  • "'Unreal, Purely Formal Relations': Realism in Christian Schad's Drawings of Queer Nightspots for Ein Führer durch das ‘lasterhafte’ Berlin (1931)". Ikonotheka 2022 (32): 101-121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31338/2657-6015ik.32.6. 
  • Catalogue entries for "Untitled (urban panorama)" and "Untitled (Ice Houses)" by Catherine Opie. In The Public Image: Social Documentary Photography from the Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum, edited by Donna Gustafson and Andres Mario Zervigon. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Dept. of Art History and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2016, pp. 30–32. https://issuu.com/zimmerli/docs/ebook.zim_thepublicimage_b4.

Honours, Awards & Grants

  • Mary H. Beatty Fellowship, 2021–22
  • W. Bernard Herman Fellowship, University of Toronto, 2021–22
  • UTM Graduate Expansion Fund Grants, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023
  • SGS Conference Travel Grant, 2022
  • SGS Research Travel Grant, 2024
  • 2024 University of Toronto-France Partnership International Doctoral Cluster Fellow

Education

MA, Rutgers University, Art History, 2017
BA, Art History with Honours, University of Chicago, 2012

Presentations

“Sophie Calle’s Des histoires vraies: Rethinking the Photographic Body Beyond Presence”. 36th World CIHA Congress: Matter/Materiality, Lyon, France. Forthcoming June 2024.
"What Queer Obscures: Photography in John Jack Baylin's Bum Bank." Association for Art History (AAH) 50th Annual Conference, Dept. of History of Art, University of Bristol, UK. "Queer Photography Now" Session. 3 April 2024.
"You're Shit and I'm Champagne: Sexuality, Aggression, and the Refusal of Repair in Todd Solondz's Happiness (1998)", Unlovable: The Centre for Comparative Literature's 31st Annual Conference, University of Toronto, ON, Canada. 25 March 2023.
“Augmenting the Closet: Stonewall Forever (2019) as Unfinished Digital Monument”, Works in Process: Dimensions of Becoming in the Arts, DFG Research Group Dimensions of techne in the Fine Arts. Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany. 6 October 2022.
“Re-Staging the Grecian Ideal: The Formation of Modern Gay Male Identity in the Pages of Grecian Guild Pictorial, ca. 1960”, RASC/a Art History Graduate Student Conference: Untethered Subjects, Southern Methodist University, Texas, USA. 14 April 2018.

Administrative Service

Co-Chair, Wollesen Memorial Symposium Committee, University of Toronto Dept. of Art History, 2019-2020
Wollesen Memorial Symposium Committee Member, 2021-Present
Social Coordinator, Graduate Union of Students of Art History, 2022-2023
Managing Editor, Rutgers Art Review Volume 33/34 (2018)
Co-Chair, Distinguished Speaker Series Committee, Rutgers University Dept. of Art History, 2015-2017
Co-Chair, Student/Faculty Symposium Committee, Rutgers University Dept. of Art History, 2015-2016

Cohort

  • 2019-2020