Sally Stein

Picture of Sally Stein
Professor Emeritus, Art History
School of Humanities
Professor Emeritus, Film & Media Studies
School of Humanities
PH.D., Yale University
Fax: (949) 824-2464
Email: surfstein@gmail.com
University of California, Irvine
2000 Humanities Gateway
Mail Code: 2785
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
American art, history of photography, feminist theory
Research Abstract
My field of research is the history of photography with particular interest in American photography of the New Deal era. Feminist issues and methodology consistently inform my efforts toward an interdiciplinary critical perspective. Along with essays on diverse aspects of twentieth-century documentary photography and mass media, I co-authored and co-curated Official Images: New Deal Photography (Smithsonian, 1988), and Montage and Modern Life (ICA/MIT, 1992). Monographic essays include an early critical essay on FSA photographer Marion Post Wolcott, and more recently the introductory essay to photographer and filmmaker Jack Delano's published memoir, along with curating a retrospective of Delano's photography and graphic art that spanned the FSA/OWI period and four decades of cultural work in Puerto Rico.


The book manuscript I am revising from my doctoral dissertation, "The Rhetoric of the Colorful and the Colorless: American Photography and Material Culture between the Wars," extends this research on interwar America. I am also at work on a volume of essays on the photography of Dorothea Lange, the first of which, "Peculiar Grace: Dorothea Lange and the Testimony of the Body," was published in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Smithsonian, 1994
Last updated
12/12/2011