Join us for a virtual talk by Dr. Erika Doss.

Erika Doss is a Distinguished Chair in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her scholarship engages the complexities of modern and contemporary American visual and material culture, with particular attention to public art, monuments, and the politics of memory.

Doss is widely known for her influential study Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), which analyzes the emotional dynamics behind contemporary memorials and commemorative practices, from grief and gratitude to shame and anger, and remains a key text in monument and memory studies. More recently, Doss published Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth Century American Artists and Religion (2023), expanding discussions of belief and meaning in modern American art. Her current research continues to focus on monuments and public memory, including projects such as Monuments Are Mortal: Public Art, Permanence, and Cultural Vandalism and Troubling Memorials: American Reckoning with the Stuff of History, which address the contested status, fragility, and political afterlives of monuments in contemporary public culture.

Event Link: https://temple.zoom.us/j/92418667821

Image Credit: Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone (2023–2025), a sculpture the artist remade from a statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson that was removed from Charlottesville, VA in 2021. The photograph shows Walker’s sculpture installed in the exhibition Monuments at The Brick in Los Angeles.