About

Maggie Cao

David G. Frey Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fellow, Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (2014–2016)

Maggie Cao received her PhD in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University in 2014. She is a scholar of American art and visual culture whose research focuses on the artistic negotiation of scientific and economic paradigm shifts during the long nineteenth century. Her book in progress, Episodes at the End of Landscape (under contract with University of California Press), examines the dissolution of landscape painting as a major cultural project in the late nineteenth-century United States. Cao is also engaged in new research on the intersections of art and economic theory in a global context. Her recent projects include an essay on China Trade glass paintings and theories of reproduction, part of a broader study on "The Counterfeit Nineteenth Century," and research on collecting, waste, and the materiality of gold for a book on painting and consumption in the Gilded Age. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Art, Art History, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Common-Place.