Margaret Olin

Margaret Olin is a Senior Research Scholar with an appointment in Yale Divinity School as well as in the Department of Religious Studies,the Program in Judaic Studies and the Department of the History of Art.

Professor Olin was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism, and Visual and Critical Studies from 1986 until her arrival at Yale in 2009. She is the author of Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (Penn State Press, 1992), The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses in Jewish Art (University of Nebraska, 2001), and co-editor of Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Her current research concerns documentary media, Jewish visual culture, and theories of witnessing and commemoration, centering on the following topics: the role of photographic practices in the construction of communities and on interpersonal relationships; sites of human interaction and/or identification, including shared spaces, where people mingle with others in imagination and reality; the impact of perceptual theory on visuality; and the visual construction of Jewish identity. She is also coeditor of the journal: Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, published by Brill.