Institute for Research in the Humanities

Jill H. Casid

Position title: UW–Madison open-topic senior fellow (2024-2028)

Pronouns: She/they

Address:
Professor of Visual Studies, Department of Art History; Department of Gender and Women's Studies, UW–Madison

A color headshot composed as a study in noir, the photograph illuminates the quilting on the shoulder of Casid’s well-worn black leather jacket, the contrast of their hair, jet except for its two face-framing flashes of white, and their dark-eyed, pale face in a field of black with raven spectacles accentuating the intensity of their gaze.

Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene

“Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene” confronts climate crisis as a problem that calls for creative practices of care—even for what defies saving or cure. The book proceeds on the premise that how we treat the dead and dying shows us how we care for life. And it seeks a pedagogy in how to live our dying on a dying planet to contest and even transform the terms of that dying. The book turns our attention to experimentation with decay in the ars moriendi of our time that teaches us how to work with what decomposes us.

A widely published artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the position of Professor of Visual Studies with a cross-appointment in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies. Casid pursues a research practice across writing, photography, and film that is dedicated to queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial interventions. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization  (Minnesota, 2005) which received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) — now in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022). Casid also co-edited the collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid exhibits their artwork nationally and internationally, including in recent exhibitions at the steirischer herbst festival in Austria and Documenta fifteen. Casid is the honored recipient of numerous awards for research and teaching, including the Kellett Mid-Career Award, the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Award, the Vilas Research Investigator Award, the Romnes Faculty Fellowship, and Hamel Faculty Fellowship. Casid was the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College and will be a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks.