Shannon Egan

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Art and Art History

Contact

Email

segan@gettysburg.edu

Phone

(717) 337 - 6125

Box

Campus Box 2452

Address

Schmucker Hall

300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400

Website

Curriculum vitae

Education

PhD Johns Hopkins University
MA Johns Hopkins University
BA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Academic Focus

American Art, History of Photography, Twentieth-Century Art, Contemporary Art

Shannon Egan is Director of the Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College and has been curating exhibitions of contemporary and historical art since 2007. She teaches courses at Gettysburg College on contemporary art, the history and theory of photography, and art and public policy. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Egan served as chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Gettysburg College.

Dr. Egan is the co-editor of the book Across the West and Toward the North: Norwegian and American Landscape Photography (University of Utah Press, 2022) and co-curator of the accompanying traveling exhibition of the same name. This exhibition is on display through 2024 in seven museums and galleries across the United States and Norway and has received support from the Wyeth Foundation of American Art, the Fritt Ord Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the United States Embassy in Oslo.

In addition to authoring articles on photographers Edward S. Curtis and Jeff Wall and over twenty exhibition catalogue essays, Dr. Egan has received awards for her research from the ACLS/Terra Foundation for the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art.

Courses Taught

Study of the history of art from the mid-nineteenth-century to today, loosely from Post-Impressionism to art made within the past five years. We critically engage with the works themselves and situate them with their larger global and cultural context and trace the evolution of artists’ various formal, social, and political commitments. In this class we will ask: What constitutes a vital artistic intervention into any era and why? What are the aesthetic, social, and technological conditions that variously inform the making and interpretation of modern and contemporary art? What publics and whose politics do art and its institutions aim to engage, contest, or occlude? In attending to these questions, we will move more or less chronologically from the mid- nineteenth century up the present, surveying major trends and thematic, while also homing in on specific artists, exhibitions, and works that emblematize both the cultural contradiction of the modern and contemporary moment and the transformative potential of aesthetics within culture.
An introduction to the history of the art historical discipline and its research and interpretive methods. A broad goal of the course is to have students build a foundation of knowledge and methodology from which to approach works of art with understanding and critical appreciation. Through lectures and class discussions students will develop a thorough familiarity with various art-historical methodologies and be able to evaluate their applicability to the analysis of individual works of art. Students in the class will curate an exhibition of artworks from the college special collection in the Schmucker art gallery. Prerequisite: ARTH 125, or permission of the instructor.
Critical examination of the art forms and issues that identify the current post-modern phase of twentieth-century art. Past and current usages of the terms 'modern' and 'avant-garde' are explored in the context of contemporary modes of visual expression, art criticism, communications technology, and cultural pluralism. Prerequisite: two courses in art history and/or theory or permission of the instructor.