Profile

University of Toronto, Ph.D., History of Art, 2013
University of Toronto, M.A., History of Art, 2008

Professor Amstutz completed her PhD in the History of Art at the University of Toronto in 2013. From 2013–2015 she was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, where she co-curated the exhibition "The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760–1860" (Yale University Art Gallery, March 6–July 26, 2015).  She joined the faculty in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UO in September 2015.

Her current book project, "Caspar David Friedrich: Landscape, Science, and the Self," considers how methods and ideas in the life sciences informed the relationship between nature and the human subject in the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s late landscapes. Her first publication from this project, "Caspar David Friedrich and the Anatomy of Nature," appeared in Art History (June 2014).

Professor Amstutz is also working on two new projects. The first explores the material and conceptual resonance of fossils in the visual arts from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, particularly in the British and German contexts. The second investigates the relationship between William Blake’s imagery and dance.