Claire Raymond

Lecturer, Art History


Claire Millikin Raymond holds a BA in Philosophy from Yale University, a Master of Fine Arts from New York University, and a Doctorate in English Literature from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has published extensively on the intersections of aesthetic theory, history and theory of photography, feminist theory, and poetics. Her work ranges from interpretation of gazing and violence in the American southeast, in Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South, to new readings of formalism in Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime, and a re-envisioning of feminist aesthetics in Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics. She is a widely-published poet, having received the Lois Prize from Calyx Journal; two of her poetry books, Motels Where We Lived and Television, were named as finalists for the Maine Literary Award in Poetry. Her current project is a book on the uncanniness of photography, in which she develops a theory of the politics of uncanniness in histories of colonization and resistance, looking at the ways that photography’s critical gaze can encompass history to re-envision the present moment. She has a Jefferson Foundation fellowship for the fall of 2018, to work on her project of interpreting the eighteenth-century roots of the concept of the uncanny. Her forthcoming book, 16 Ways of Looking at a Photograph: Contemporary Theories, just as the title suggests explores photography theory.