Brianne Cohen

I am an art historian specializing in contemporary art and visual culture in the public sphere. My research and teaching focus on issues of ecology and the environment, empire and decolonization, political violence, and health and medical issues. I am on sabbatical during the academic year 2025-2026.

My most recent book, Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (forthcoming fall 2026, University of Minnesota Press, open access), examines lens-based artwork in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore that offers alternative, more ethical visions of planetary inhabitation amidst the growing climate crisis. It draws on discourses that debate the role of the camera lens in representing discrete and structural violence, arguing that such scholarship should move beyond an anthropocentric gaze to address the difficulties of empathically picturing and feeling emotional connection to a more-than-human environment. It offers a first critical account of marginalized artwork—from a region where the term ecocide was first coined and where ecological destruction is still rampant—that depicts empathy for nonhumans through animist feelings of relationality central to Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews. In analyzing such artwork, my book aims to connects genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate a more durational vision for planetary coexistence from a part of the globe typically neglected in scholarship on the visual arts and the Anthropocene. The writing of this book was supported by AAUW and CHA Faculty Fellowships, among other research grants.

Relatedly, I co-edited an open-access volume Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects (Amherst College Press, 2023), which traverses multiple disciplines and diverse forms (essays, poems, multimedia artworks) as an “archive of feelings” in response to the climate crisis. The e-book probes intersectional issues concerning the changing planet as they affect specific peoples, communities, wildlife species, and ecosystems in varying and inequitable ways. This co-edited volume resulted from a Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Deep Horizons: Making Visible an Unseen Spectrum of Ecological Casualties & Prospects” (2020-22), which I co-led in exploring environmental futures related to art and visual culture, ecology, indigeneity, and climate justice.

Also concerned with the creation of critical public spheres, my first book Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke University Press, 2023, open access) analyzes contemporary art that grapples with cross-cultural affiliation and the active imagining of nonviolence in 21^st-century Europe. It examines the artwork of Harun Farocki, Thomas Hirschhorn, and the artist collective Henry VIII’s Wives from 2004-2009, when the idea of Europe and its increasing transnationalization became quite charged.

Additionally, I co-edited The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2016), which explores the different ways that art, cinema, and other forms of visual culture respond to a digitized, networked world, where traditional discourses of medium specificity, developed in distinct disciplines, fail to provide an adequate description of the transformations that photography and film have undergone. This book arose from a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Université Catholique de Louvain and Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography in Brussels, Belgium. Before arriving at CU Boulder in 2017, I also held Visiting Assistant Professor positions at Amherst College and Brown University.

Currently, I serve as field editor for contemporary art for caa.reviews. I have also received a CU Boulder Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Graduate School and participated in numerous, national and local teaching & learning fellowships and seminars.

Work with Students

I enjoy working with M.A. and Ph.D. students who engage with a diversity of topics in contemporary art and visual culture, particularly on matters of ecology and socio-environmental justice. I would be eager to also work with students engaged with artistic questions of health/wellness and the medical humanities.

Courses Taught

• Contemporary Art & the Politics of Care (graduate seminar)
• Art, Ecology, and Climate Justice (graduate seminar)
• Art in the Public Sphere (graduate seminar)
• Theories of Art History/Research and Methodologies (graduate seminar, cross-enrolled with Critical Media Practices)
• Contemporary Art
• Global Contemporary Art Since 1989
• Contemporary Art and Ecology
• Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia
• Photography and Political Violence (capstone seminar)
• Eco-Video in Southeast Asia
• Art, Public, Site: Imagining Place and Making Worlds (first-year seminar co-taught with Yumi Roth)