Jennifer Way, PhD

I am an art history scholar, course creator, educator, and mentor whose current research and teaching focus on craft history and intersections of art with conflict and war, disability, race, gender, and healing, particularly in U.S. and transnational contexts from the nineteenth century to the present.

I am grateful for the many colleagues and students I have had the good fortune to know and work with, and for opportunities to contribute to their books, projects, conferences, and other scholarly and creative endeavors.

Books

Craft and War: Makers, Users, and Craft Practices since the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Bloomsbury Academic, 2026.
Editor.

Craft and War examines craft—its fabrication, makers, users, and uses—in relation to wars since the mid-nineteenth century. Sixteen essays invite cross-national, cultural, and chronological comparisons.

 The Politics of Vietnamese Craft: American Diplomacy and Domestication. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

The Politics of Vietnamese Craft examines how Americans appropriated Vietnamese craft through programs that brought U.S. diplomatic agendas and domestic life into relation with questions of South Vietnam’s belonging in the Free World from approximately 1955 to 1961.

Recent Book Chapters and Essays

“Exhibitions for the Free World Abroad and at Home: Annemarie Pope’s SITES [Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service] during the Early Cold War.” In Early Women Curators: Making the Museum in the Twentieth Century, edited by Rachel Eisner and Laia Anguix-Vilches. Routledge, 2026. In press.

“Racial Dynamics of Craft Therapy: Lewis Hine’s Chelsea Naval Hospital Photograph for the American Red Cross.” In Craft in Extremis: Survival and Creativity in Modern War, edited by Rebecca Gill and Wendy Wiertz. Manchester University Press, 2026. In press.

“Cultural Actors in Rehabilitation: WW2 Craft Therapy and White, Ableist, Heteronormative Masculinity.” In Medical Care, Humanitarianism, and Intimacy in the Long Second World War, 1931–1953, edited by Laure Humbert, Marie-Luce Desgrandchamps, and Bertrand Taithe, 341–382. Manchester University Press, 2025.

“Where Taste Meets Intention: Fallingwater’s ‘Asian’ Collection.” In Fallingwater: Living with and in Art, edited by Gunther and Scott Perkins, 169–205. Rizzoli International Publications, 2025.

“The Museum of Modern Art and Craft-Based Occupational Therapy.” In Modernism, Art, Therapy, edited by Suzanne Hudson and Tanya Sheehan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. Chapter 15. https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32162

“From Salvaging to Merchandising—Vietnamese Craft on Display in America, 1956–1958.” In Exhibitions beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design from 1945, edited by Verity Clarkson, Harriet Atkinson, and Sarah Lichtman, 39–58. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

“Prolegomena for Craft Therapy during World War 1.” In Encountering Craft: Methodological Approaches from Anthropology, Art History, and Design, edited by Chandan Bose and Mira Mohsini, 93–113. Routledge, 2023.

“Subjects of Industry: Craft Therapy, Its Photography, and Healing American Soldiers of World War 1.” In Dis/ability in Media, Law, and History: Embodied AND Socially Constructed, edited by Micky Lee, Pat Reeve, and Frank Rudy Cooper, 59–75. Routledge, 2022.

“Healing WW1 Soldiers with Craft Therapy and Its Photographic Narratives of Masculine Ableism and White Privilege.” Material Culture: The Journal of the International Society for Landscape, Place, & Material Culture 53, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 34–54. Special issue, “Material Cultures of Sickness, Health, and Healing.”

Selected Scholarship on Craft, Diplomacy, and Vietnam

“Allaying Terror: Domesticating Vietnamese Refugee Artisans as Subjects of American Diplomacy.” Humanities 7, no. 3 (2018). Special issue, “Pictures and Conflicts since 1945.” https://doi.org/10.3390/h7030077

“Mobilizing Craft: Diplomacy in the International Turn of American Art History.” MODOS: Revista de História da Arte 2, no. 1 (2018): 67–82.

“American Design Diplomacy in South Vietnam, 1956: Gender as a Diplomatic Relation.” REGAC: Revista de Estudios Globales & Arte Contemporáneo 5, no. 1 (2017–2018): 93–116. Special issue, “Cold War Networks and Circulations: Cross-Cultural Dialogues and Practices throughout the Global South (1957–1991).”

“The Liminal Collection: Vietnamese Handicraft at the Smithsonian.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1, no. 2 (2015): 115–135. Special issue, “Collecting Asias,” edited by Charlotte Eubanks and Jonathan Abe.

“‘A Bazaar in the Coliseum’: Marketing Southeast Asian Handicrafts in New York, 1956.” Open Arts Journal 2 (2013), “Architecture of Display” section.

“Orientalizing Vietnam: The American Cold War, Its ‘Problems’ with Refugee Handicraft Artisans, and Their Relationship to Barthes’s Mythologies.” Altre Modernità/Otras Modernidades/Autres Modernités/Other Modernities 8 (2012): 94–120. Special issue, “Orientalisms.”

“‘Gold Mine in Southeast Asia’: Russel Wright, Vietnamese Handicraft, and Transnational Consumption.” In A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East-West Interchanges in American Art, edited by Cynthia Mills, Lee Glazer, and Amelia A. Goerlitz, 158–173. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2012.

“Russel Wright and Handicraft: Transnational Collecting Practices.” Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 5, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 103–126.

Selected Scholarship on Modern and Contemporary Art

My scholarship also examines modern and contemporary art and visual culture in Ireland, Britain, and the United States, with particular interests in national identity, transnationalism, gender, technology, and material culture. This work includes studies of artists such as Sean Hillen, Tracey Emin, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Whitfield Lovell, as well as digital and new media art.

“Visualizing Dublin, ‘O’Connell Street as the “Nation’s Main Street.’” In Reimagining Ireland: A Reader, edited by Eamon Maher, 197–220. Peter Lang, 2017.

“Digital Art at the Interface of Technology and Gender.” In A Companion to Digital Art, edited by Christiane Paul, 181–200. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

“O’Connell Street as the ‘Nation’s Main Street’: The Image of Ireland’s Modernity and Irelantis.” In Visualizing Dublin: Visual Culture, Modernity and the Representation of Urban Space, edited by Justin Carville, 221–245. Peter Lang, 2014.

“Tracey Emin’s Photographs and Films of Turkey and Cyprus.” In Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity, edited by Liz Wells, Theopisti Stylianou, and Nicos Philippou, 193–217. I.B. Tauris, 2014.

With Morehshin Allahyari. “Digital/New Media Art and Contemporary Iran: Questions of Gender.” Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus (2013): 16–25. Special issue, “Tracing New/Media/Feminisms.”

“Reading [Eduardo Paolozzi’s] Psychological Atlas Transnationally.” Visual Culture in Britain 13, no. 2 (2012): 227–247.

“Back to the Future: Women, Art, Technology.” In Cyberfeminism 2.0. Peter Lang, 2012.

“The Nation of Irelantis: Ireland as Elsewhere.” Journal of European Popular Culture 1, no. 2 (2010): 89–107.

“‘Imaginings’ of Geography: Devolution, Americanisation, and Works of Art, Writing and Culture.” Third Text 20, no. 2 (2006): 223–232.

“Reterritorialization and Whispers from the Walls.” Journal of Material Culture 9, no. 3 (2004): 219–236.

“Negotiating the ‘Resemblances of Surfaces’: Painterly Abstract Painting and Consumer Culture, ca. 1945–1965.” Review of Radical Political Economics 36, no. 4 (2004): 487–505.

Fellowships and Research Support

My research and teaching have been supported by fellowships and awards from the Archives of American Art and the Kress Foundation; the Fulbright Scholar Program; Trinity College Dublin; the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin; the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; the Institute of International Visual Arts, London; the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Terra Foundation for American Art; the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; the Newberry Library; and the Center for Craft.

Teaching

At my current institution, I advanced the undergraduate and graduate art history curriculum by establishing craft history as a core area of study. My course Craft and Conflict examines craft in relation to war and conflict, disability and ableism, civil rights, and other historical and cultural contexts.

I also designed and delivered a multi-course curricular concentration examining art and art history in relation to healing, care, wellness, health, and medicine. Courses including Disability and Photography, American Art and Healing, Caring, and Politics of Belonging investigate questions of subjectivity, representation, ethics, normativity, disability, narrative, and historical experience.

These courses emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship, critical historiography, and student engagement with primary sources, approaches that also inform my Methodologies of Art History course.I have supervised more than 60 MA art history research projects, served on numerous MFA committees, and created and taught more than 30 seminar topics and 15 upper-level art history courses. I have regularly brought scholars and artists into my courses to engage directly with students. My teaching and mentoring have been recognized with university awards for student research mentorship and teaching.

Leadership

For Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, I served as an inaugural co-editor of Digital Dialogues, a section devoted to critical commentary on born-digital and virtual initiatives and data-driven scholarship affecting American art history. For the College Art Association, I am a member of the Services to Historians of Visual Arts Committee, a Professional Committee. Previously, I served on the Council of Readers, evaluating proposed sessions and papers for the annual conference.

At the University of North Texas, I developed collaborative, interdisciplinary academic projects with colleagues across my college and university and with organizations in the Dallas–Fort Worth region and beyond. Selected examples include the public interview series Conversations: Art, Politics & North Texas; the symposium Leadership Perspectives on Technology and Art; student teaching for the Virtual Senior Center in New York City; and Collections, Cultures, and Collaborations, a student-research and collections-based project developed with local museums and collecting organizations.

I have served as PI and Co-PI for external and internal grants and fellowships, including support from the Design History Society; Humanities Texas, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Edward and Betty Marcus Digital Education Project for Texas Art Museums; and the Yale Center for British Art.

My university leadership and service have focused on faculty governance, academic policy, mentoring, curriculum development, and access to institutional information. Working across the university, I developed a faculty cohort to study and report on the professional experiences and status of women faculty. I originated the Art History program’s 4+1 BA/MA degree track, which enables high-achieving undergraduate art history majors to begin graduate study during their senior year. I have overseen merit, promotion, and tenure processes for my college and program and mentored probationary faculty through tenure. I have also served as Art History program coordinator, chaired academic search committees, and led or served on college academic, gallery, policy, and grievance committees.

Peer Reviewing

My peer-review work includes evaluating conference proposals, grant applications, book manuscripts, and journal articles. I have reviewed for the College Art Association, Council on Undergraduate Research, European Science Foundation, HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), Danish Council for Independent Research, Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, Bloomsbury Academic, and University of Washington Press. I have also reviewed manuscripts for Folklore, Irish Studies Review, Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Art Journal, American Art, Journal of Modern Craft, and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.