Dr. Michael H. Feinberg is a visiting assistant professor of art history at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY). His broader research and teaching interests center on art and visual culture of the Atlantic World (1600-present). Feinberg holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2023).
Feinberg's first book project, "Caribbean Landscapes and Agencies Beyond the Human in British Print Culture Surrounding the Haitian Revolution" examines how landscape imagery of the Atlantic World enabled Britons’ to grapple with colonial loss as what has been called the Haitian Revolution unfolded. Taking some of the most influential illustrated works of history and natural history written, edited, or printed while British forces were active in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) as case studies, this project divulges landscape's ability to render some of the least-studied histories of colonial resistance with visibility.
Feinberg has published various articles and has several under various stages of peer-review. His most recent publication ( Journal of Visual Culture with the Harun Farocki Institut (45)) is a co-authored article that reframes the crisis of COVID-19 through what has been called the Necrocene. Earlier digital publications include an analysis of how the Haitian landscape was perceived (EdgeEffects, 2017) and of the relationship between personhood and blackness in Anne-Louis Girodet’s Citizen Belley portrait (2016).
Beyond publications, Feinberg's work has been or will be featured at national conferences including the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (2022), Modern Language Association (2021) and the College Arts Association conference (2020). He has also given guest lectures at the Boston Athenaeum (2020) and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2019).
Feinberg teaches visual culture and art with a keen eye towards unsettling Eurocentric perspectives. He has taught both theory of photography (fall 2019) and contemporary art (spring 2020) as a lecturer. More recently, he taught "Art and Visual Culture of the Atlantic World" (summer 2022).
Feinberg’s research has been supporting by numerous grants from institutions such as the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the John Carter Brown Library, the Huntington Library, and the Clark Library at UCLA.