Brianne Cohen

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

My first book Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke University Press, 2023, open access) examines contemporary art that grapples with cross-cultural affiliation and the active imagining of nonviolence in 21^st-century Europe. From 2004-2009, at a time when the idea of Europe and its borders became quite charged, public discourse and art-making around issues of European transnationalization and civic belonging exploded across the continent. With a boundary-crossing approach and multigenerational lens, Don’t Look Away offers closely hewn interpretations of artworks by Harun Farocki, Thomas Hirschhorn, the artist collective Henry VIII’s Wives, and Daniela Ortiz. These among other artworks aimed to connect pressing legacies of the Holocaust and the continuing duress of imperial formations, to rising Islamophobia and anti-Roma and anti-immigrant sentiment. I contend that their recursive (repeating yet different) multimedia art projects, tackling the structural conditions of more invisible or slower violence across transnational borders, worked to actively imagine a horizon of nonviolence in contested European public spheres. Additionally, I proffer original concepts—securitarian publics and preventive publics—to examine directions in public sphere formation and mass-stranger-based discourse in Europe during this time. Ultimately, through this analytical framework, I argue that a messier, less quantifiable realm of art-making may actively turn audiences toward nonviolent modes of inhabiting the world through a type of anticipatory art activism, holding the potential to change mindsets precisely when violence seems to saturate that world. The research and writing of Don’t Look Away were supported by Andrew W. Mellon and DAAD Fellowships, among other fellowships and grants.

My second book, The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (forthcoming fall 2026, University of Minnesota Press, open access), continues investigations into histories of imperial violence and artistic-public resistance to such aggression. In the wake of centuries of cascading socio-environmental violence in Southeast Asia—from rainforest destruction by colonial-industrial plantations to toxic defoliation and bombed landscapes during imperial wars—contemporary lens-based artwork from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore today offers alternative, more ethical visions of planetary inhabitation amidst the growing climate crisis. The Empathic Lens offers a first critical account of marginalized artwork, from a region where ecological destruction is still rampant, which depicts empathy for nonhumans through animist feelings of relationality central to Southeast Asian Indigenous worldviews. I draw 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 more-than-human environments. In analyzing such artwork, The Empathic Lens 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.

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 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)