Sara Blair

Sara Blair works across visual culture studies, 20th- and 21st-century literature, history and theory of photography, and Jewish American culture.  Her publications include How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images (Princeton University Press), Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press), Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945, co-edited with Joseph Entin and Franny Nudelman (University of North Carolina Press), Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA, co-authored with Eric Rosenberg (University of California Press), Jewish in America,co-edited with Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan Press), Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge University Press), and numerous essays on subjects ranging from Jews and/in photography to traditions of documentary and observation and the use of visual genres in projects of social resistance. Her current work focuses on the lives of the image as material object, aesthetic form, and resource for literary and cultural narratives from the advent of photography through the digital era.

Her work has been supported by National Endowment for the Humanities, ACLS, and Michigan Humanities fellowships. She has collaborated with curators at the DIA, the International Center of Photography, and the Addison Gallery of American Art, served as consultant/advisor to several photographic projects and exhibitions, and curated exhibitions at UM’s Institute for the Humanities and the Middlebury Art Museum. In her teaching she has developed modules and classroom experiences to enable students to explore a range of practices—curation, archival engagement, digital exhibition, extended reality (VR, AR, XR) engagement—that support richer scholarship in the humanities. She has advocated for and led foundation- and campus-funded projects in support of wider career opportunities for humanities PhDs, diversity PhD pipeline programs, and new research models for twenty-first century humanities practice.