Whitney Thompson

Whitney Thompson conducted her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree with University Honors in the History of Art and Film and Video Studies. After working in New York City museums for five years, she entered the PhD program in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, to study nineteenth-century U.S. art and architecture under Professor Katherine Manthorne. She is simultaneously earning a certificate in The Graduate Center’s American Studies program. This spring, she will defend her dissertation, “Foreign-born Artists Making “American” Pictures: The Immigrant Experience and the Art of the United States, 1819-1893,” whichexamines the assimilation experiences of nineteenth-century, foreign-born American artists in relationship to the larger patterns of immigrant behavior. To develop her dissertation, Thompson has conducted research in Germany under CASVA’s Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad and at the U.S. Capitol Building as a Capitol Historical Society fellow. Thompson has also been awarded The Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Dissertation Fellowship, the Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Fellowship, a Graduate Teaching Fellowship, and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Internship in The Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing. Thompson currently teaches the History of American Art as an adjunct professor at the Fashion Instituteof Technology, SUNY, and Hunter College, CUNY. Her conference paper stems from her dissertation, which includes chapters on the landscape imagery of painter Thomas Cole and Currier and Ives lithographer Frances Palmer.