Rate My Professor Michael Leja

Leja's research examines visual arts in media such as painting, sculpture, film, photography, prints, and illustrations from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily in the United States, analyzing them alongside contemporaneous cultural, social, political, and intellectual contexts, with emphasis on subjectivity, skepticism, and audience interactions. His major books are Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (Yale University Press, 1993), Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (University of California Press, 2004), and A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States (2025); he co-authored Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources (Terra Foundation for American Art and University of Chicago Press, 2020). Notable awards include the Charles C. Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (1996) for Reframing Abstract Expressionism, Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (2005) for Looking Askance, Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Clark Art Institute, and the College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award (2025). Leja's contributions have significantly impacted scholarship on American modernism and visual culture.