Lisa E Bloom

Education

Lisa E. Bloom earned a B.A. from Trinity College (Connecticut) in art history, a MFA in the History of Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and from Visual Studies Workshop and a Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program, University of California, Santa Cruz where she did her thesis under the direction of James Clifford, Donna Haraway, and Hayden White. She also has received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University (1993-1995) and a Postdoctoral fellowship at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.

Teaching

Bloom has taught art history and cultural studies at the University of California, San Diego, Josai International University, the University of California, Irvine; San Francisco State University, San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Santa Cruz She is currently a visiting scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.

Books and essay contributions

Bloom is the author of many books, including Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (1993), which is the first critical book on the Arctic and Antarctic written from a feminist perspective. This book in polar studies and polar exploration literature was described by the Women's Review of Books as, "...part of a long overdue effort to rewrite the old sexist and racist histories of exploration". Publishers Weekly described it as “making a good case for her intriguing central thesis“.

Her edited anthology titled With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (1999), demonstrates how feminist, postcolonial and antiracist concerns can be successfully incorporated into the history of art, and includes essays by Irit Rogoff, Jennifer Gonzalez, Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, Griselda Pollock, Zoe Leonard, Francette Pacteau, amongst others. Her work on this topic continues in her articles on artists such as Isaac Julien, Eleanor Antin, Connie Samaras, Natalie Talec, and Katja Aglert and in essays on Chinese and Japanese feminist contemporary art in anthologies such as Feminism and Visual Culture, edited by Amelia Jones and in the Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff.

She is the also the author of Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (2006) that explores the place of Jewishness in feminist art in the United States. It was described in Art History (journal) as addressing a topic that is under-theorized and difficult to talk about. Her ongoing work in this area includes Ghosts of Ethnicity: Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art (2007), and an article on Jewish women’s bodies titled, Barbies’s Jewish Roots: Jewish Women’s Bodies and Feminist Art (2008).

Bloom’s ongoing work on gender, climate change and the polar regions includes co-editing with Laura Kay and Elena Glasberg a special issue on polar art for the online journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online at Barnard College (2008), a 2012 article on climate change, art, and the polar regions co-written with Elena Glasberg titled Disappearing Ice and Missing Data: Visual Culture of the Polar Regions and Global Warming, and a 2015 article on oil and the polar regions titled Witnessing Climate Change: Oil, Geopolitics and Landscapes of Invisibility.