Stephen Mandravelis

Assistant Professor of Art History; Director, Thompson Gallery of Art

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Stephen Mandravelis received his PhD in the art and material culture of the United States from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018. His research focuses on the interaction of art and everyday life, specifically how vernacular images and objects shaped ideas of popular taste, geopolitical standing, and self-identity. Dr. Mandravelis' work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SECAC, the Royster Society of Fellows, and others. His writing has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Nineteenth-Century American History; Southern Things: A Place, Its People, and Its Things; and Not About Face: Identity and Appearance, Past and Present. Prior to joining Furman's faculty in 2023, Dr. Mandravelis taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. A native of New England, Dr. Mandravelis has been exploring the art, food, and broader culture of the US South since 2012.

Honors and Awards

  • William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art Since 1750, SECAC, 2019

Education

  • Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • M.A., Rutgers University
  • B.A., College of the Holy Cross

Research Interests

My research investigates artistic hierarchies and the social implementation of their often-unarticulated ideologies. I question why hierarchies were constructed, how they were conferred, to whom they were marketed, and—most importantly—the moments of rupture in which they cease to function as intended. My training centers on the art of the United States, African American art, and contemporary self-taught, folk, and vernacular art. Methodologically, I broadly classify myself as a social art historian, although my scholarship regularly draws from disciplines such as cultural anthropology, phenomenology, critical and material culture theory, digital art history, environmental studies, food studies, reception theory, critical race theory, and gender studies.

My work in the Victorian-era United States explores the rapid profusion of quotidian imagery (namely mass-produced engravings, illustrated books, pictorial magazines, and early photographs) and their use in the everyday lives of audiences who were typically excluded elite artistic spheres (urban immigrants, rural farmers, women, enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, and children). By exploring both how these constituents were engaged by an emerging mass visual culture and prioritizing how these communities responded to, subverted, and appropriated this hegemonic culture for their own ends, my research charts the tumultuous evolution of popular taste, geopolitical standing, gender propriety, racial self-understanding, and the nature of visual perception. In the contemporary moment, my work seeks to dismantle, disrupt, and counteract the vestiges of the systemic inequities that have long been internalized within the discipline of art history. This research centers on art created by self-taught and vernacular African American artists in the US South and the collection, display, and marketing of these artists. I am also interested in the politics of museums and their institutionality, as well as the ethical issues surrounding museum curation.

Publications

  • “The American Agriculturist: Art and Agriculture in the United States’ First Illustrated Farming Journal, 1842–78,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 20, no. 3 (Autumn 2021), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2021.20.3.2

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