Dr Freya Field-Donovan

Rosalind, Lady Carlisle Research Fellow in Art History

Research themes

I specialise in American art with particular emphasis on technology, photography, film, and performance. My research focuses on the intersections of class, race, and labour with artistic modernism in nineteenth and twentieth-century America. My PhD, titled A Strange American Funeral: Dance and Technological Reproduction in 1940s USA, was completed in 2022 at University College London. This research reconsiders dance as a medium in art's history by inverting its conventional location from the dancing body to the materials and media through which dance was documented—film, photographic books, and exhibitions. My current research centres on the overlooked film historian, translator, and filmmaker Jay Leyda (1910–1988), whose connections to figures such as Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, and to institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Film and Photo League, reveal crucial gaps in our understanding of American modernism's formation. My article 'Modernity's Children: Form as Authority in the Films and Photobooks of Helen Levitt' recently won the Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers.