Ph.D., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 2023

B.A. (Honors), Art History, Swarthmore College, 2009

 

Chinese art

Transpacific visual culture

Material culture methods, theories of exchange

 

Susan Eberhard is an art historian of late imperial China in a global context, focusing on decorative arts and material culture. She uses objects and interdisciplinary methods to study historical processes of mobility and exchange, transformation, and loss. Her research and teaching take postcolonial, feminist, and comparative approaches to how knowledge about art is constructed and circulated. She is also interested in transpacific frameworks, Asian American art, and the history of museums, exhibitions, and archives.

 

Susan has taught art history at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and the California College of the Arts (CCA). She has worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and held positions at the Peabody Essex Museum and SFMOMA. Her research has been supported by organizations including the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Terra Foundation, the Blakemore Freeman Foundation, the Decorative Arts Trust, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Huntington Library.

 

 

Articles

“The Asian Silver Chocolatière: The Transpacific World in a Diplomatic Gift,”

Journal18 14 (Fall 2022), https.journal18.org/6528

 

“Concessions in ‘The Silver Age’: Exhibiting Chinese Export Silverware in China,” Journal of Transcultural Studies 10:2 (2019): 126-170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.jts.2019.2.23936

 

Catalogue Essays

“Li Hongzhang (李鸿章 1823-1901) - Diplomat Brokering an International Vision of China,” in Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives - From Empire to Republic, 1796-1912, eds. Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell (Thames and Hudson, 2023), 271-274; Chinese translation forthcoming from China South Publishing & Media Group

 

“Pseudo Marks and Modular Finials: Chinese Export Silverwares Against the Assay,” The Silver Age: Origins, Production, and Trade of Export Silverwares in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region, ed. Libby Lai-Pik Chan with Nina Lai-Na Wan, exhibition catalogue (Hong Kong Maritime Museum, 2017), in English and Chinese, 219-246

 

Forthcoming

“Extractive Romances: Crafting Silver Mythologies in Treaty-Port China,” in China’s 1800s: Material and Visual Culture, British Museum, eds. Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell

 

ARTH 001R. FYS: Art in Flux: Metamorphosis and the Arts of China

ARTH 154. Art of Modern China: Honors Seminar