Chris Reed

Biography

Christopher Reed holds a PhD in the History of Art, and directs the dual-title PhD program in Visual Studies. His courses focus on the relationship between literature and visual culture. Specific courses deal with the Bloomsbury group, with Japanist aesthetics, with queer art and visual culture, and with the interdisciplinary field(s) of Visual Studies.

Reed's scholarship on the Bloomsbury group focused on Roger Fry's formalist aesthetic theories and their relationship to Virginia Woolf's textual experimentation, on Bloomsbury's relationship to its Victorian forebears, and, most extensively, in his book Bloomsbury Rooms (2004), on how the domestic spaces created by the Bloomsbury artists relate to the lives and work they contained.

His studies of Western fantasies about Japan include a translation of a novella by the illustrator Félix Régamey as The Chrysanthème Papers: The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysanthème and other Documents of French Japonisme (2010). His book Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (2017) was awarded the Modernist Studies Book Prize for that year.

Reed is also the author of Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas (2011), a wide-ranging history of the relationship between ideas about sexual identity and the identity of the artist. He is also co-author, with Christopher Castiglia, of If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (2012) and several other essays on aspects of queer culture.

With Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Joyce Robinson, Reed organized the 2021 exhibition and related publication, Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer. He is currently working on an exhibition of Pennsylvania Dutch paper arts, and on a book about kinesthetic empathy in American art.

In 2019, Reed was awarded the Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts and Humanities at Penn State. He served as Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art History at Oxford University in 2022–23.