julia elizabeth neal

julia elizabeth neal specializes in modern and contemporary art of the United States, with an emphasis on African American art history. Her research considers relations between the visual and the conceptual (sonic and kinetic) to emergent politics of identity and (trans)nationalisms since World War II. She explores art as a discursive phenomena in service of, refusal against, and ambivalence towards, nationhood and its social and cultural dimensions. Her interests in disguised and disregarded forms of power also consider console gaming and constituent cultures of role-playing that enable gamers models of abstractions of individual and world affairs. neal's scholarship invests in archival study, critical historiography, deconstruction, critical race theory, feminisms and Black studies.

her book in progress is on the intermedia art praxis of Benjamin Patterson, which extends from her dissertation, "Who Taught You to Think (Like That)": Benjamin Patterson's Conceptual Aesthetic. Her research is supported by the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Getty Research Institute, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Ford Foundation, the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and Spelman College. 

Prior to the U of M, neal has lectured at Georgia State University, and Spelman College, and is a consultant to the Estate of Benjamin Patterson and author of Performance Works within the State of Benjamin Patterson: A Catalogue Raisonné Volume I (2021), a site-specific survey and inventory of Patterson's Hamburg-based archive for future study by researchers, enthusiasts, and the public.