Kaja Silverman (born September 16, 1947) is an American art historian and critical theorist. She is currently the Katherine and Keith L. Sachs Professor of Art History at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the

University of California Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the Un ...

and a Ph.D. in English from

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

. Thereafter, she taught at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

Trinity College Trinity College may refer to: Australia * Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales * Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...

Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University (SFU) is a public research university in British Columbia, Canada, with three campuses, all in Greater Vancouver: Burnaby (main campus), Surrey, and Vancouver. The main Burnaby campus on Burnaby Mountain, located from ...

, the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of Roc ...

and for many years was the Class of 1940 Professor in the Rhetoric Department at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. She was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 2008, and is currently the holder of an

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

Distinguished Achievement Award.

Work

Her writing and teaching at the moment are focused primarily on photography, contemporary art, and painting. She is currently writing the second volume, ''A Three-Personed Picture: or the History of Photography Part 2,'' of a three part revisionary history and theory of photography. The first volume, ''Miracle of Analogy,'' was published in 2015. Silverman has written extensively on a wide range of figures including artists:

Jean-Luc Godard Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as Fran� ...

Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German ...

Marcel Proust Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (; ; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel ''In Search of Lost Time'' (''À la recherche du temps perdu''; with the previous Eng ...

Ranier Maria Rilke René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...

Terrence Malick Terrence Frederick Malick (born November 30, 1943) is an American filmmaker. His films include '' Days of Heaven'' (1978), '' The Thin Red Line'' (1998), for which he received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenp ...

, James Coleman,

Jeff Wall Jeffrey Wall, Order of Canada, OC, Royal Society of Canada, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Van ...

Chantal Akerman Chantal Anne Akerman (; 6 June 19505 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and Film studies, film professor at the City College of New York. She is best known for films such as ''Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 108 ...

John Dugdale (photographer) John Dugdale (born 1960 in Connecticut) is an American art photographer. Early life and career Dugdale's interest in photography started at the age of twelve with his first camera, which was a present from his mother. He attended the School of th ...

, and thinkers:

Jacques Lacan Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...

Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. (; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest an ...

Lou Andreas-Salomé Lou Andreas-Salomé (born either Louise von Salomé or Luíza Gustavovna Salomé or Lioulia von Salomé, russian: link=no, Луиза Густавовна Саломе; 12 February 1861 – 5 February 1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a ...

. Silverman co-wrote ''Speaking About Godard'' with the German artist and filmmaker

Harun Farocki Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film. Early life and education Farocki was born as Harun El Usman FaroqhiMargalit Fox (3 August 2014)''New York Times''. in Neutitschein, which is n ...

, her life partner from 1992–1999. George Baker of UCLA says of ''Flesh of My Flesh'': "This is an extraordinary book: Silverman's magnum opus. In some respects it is sui generis, and yet its stakes are so high they could almost be called universal. In my opinion, this is the kind of book that one comes across only a few times in one's life. It is that important."

Publications

*''The Subject of Semiotics'' (Oxford University Press, 1983) *''The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema'' (Indiana University Press, 1988) *''Male Subjectivity at the Margins'' (Routledge Press, 1992) *''The Threshold of the Visible World'' (Routledge Press, 1996) *''Speaking About Godard'' (New York University Press, 1998; with

) *''World Spectators'' (Stanford University Press, 2000) *''James Coleman'' (Munich:

Hatje Cantz Hatje Cantz Verlag (English: Hatje Cantz Publishing) is a German book publisher specialising in photography, art, architecture and design. It was established in 1945 by Gerd HatjeThe Miracle of Analogy - Kaja Silverman
/ref>

References

External links

*
"The Twilight of Posterity." Kaja Silverman Lecture at UC Berkeley.
* ttp://www.kajasilverman.com Website. {{DEFAULTSORT:Silverman, Kaja Living people 1947 births Brown University alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty Jewish American writers Film theorists Jewish feminists Jewish philosophers American art historians Writers from Pennsylvania American feminist writers Women art historians American women historians