About

Sara Blair is the Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of English and a faculty associate of American Culture and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the lives of images as material objects, aesthetic forms, and resources for literary and cultural narratives from the advent of photography through the digital era. She has published extensively on topics related to visual culture, documentary photography, and the intersections of race, nation, and representation in American literature and culture. Her work includes books such as 'How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images' and 'Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century,' among others. She has also co-edited volumes on documentary culture and Jewish American identity. Blair's scholarship has been supported by prestigious fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ACLS, and Michigan Humanities. She has collaborated with major art institutions, served as a consultant and curator for photographic projects and exhibitions, and developed innovative classroom modules that incorporate curation, archival engagement, and digital exhibition practices. In her administrative role as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, she has led initiatives to develop cross-campus funding programs and projects, including The Humanities Collaboratory. Her teaching includes courses on literary studies, and she is dedicated to expanding career opportunities for humanities PhDs, promoting diversity, and fostering new research models for the humanities in the twenty-first century.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Art history
• Literature
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• How the Other Half Looks

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-09 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  How New York’s Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing America New York City's Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the "other half," was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies. This book takes an unprecedented look at the practices of observation that emerged from this critical site of encounter, showing how they have informed literary and everyday narratives of America, its citizens, and its possible futures. Taking readers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Sara Blair traces the career of the Lower East Side as a place where image-makers, writers, and social reformers tested new techniques for apprehending America--and their subjects looked back, confronting the means used to represent them. This dynamic shaped the birth of American photojournalism, the writings of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan, and the forms of early cinema. During the 1930s, the emptying ghetto opened contested views of the modern city, animating the work of such writers and photographers as Henry Roth, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. After World War II, the Lower East Side became a key resource for imagining poetic revolution, as in the work of Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, and exploring dystopian futures, from Cold War atomic strikes to the death of print culture and the threat of climate change. How the Other Half Looks reveals how the Lower East Side has inspired new ways of looking—and looking back—that have shaped literary and popular expression as well as American modernity.

  PublisherDOI

• How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images

  2018-06-05

  book1st authorCorresponding

  New York City's Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the "other half," was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies. This book takes an unprecedented look at the practices of observation that emerged from this critical site of encounter, showing how they have informed literary and everyday narratives of America, its citizens, and its possible futures. Taking readers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Sara Blair traces the career of the Lower East Side as a place where image-makers, writers, and social reformers tested new techniques for apprehending America--and their subjects looked back, confronting the means used to represent them. This dynamic shaped the birth of American photojournalism, the writings of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan, and the forms of early cinema. During the 1930s, the emptying ghetto opened contested views of the modern city, animating the work of such writers and photographers as Henry Roth, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. After World War II, the Lower East Side became a key resource for imagining poetic revolution, as in the work of Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, and exploring dystopian futures, from Cold War atomic strikes to the death of print culture and the threat of climate change. How the Other Half Looks reveals how the Lower East Side has inspired new ways of looking-and looking back-that have shaped literary and popular expression as well as American modernity

  PublisherDOI

• After the Fact

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2018-04-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In “After the Fact: Postwar Dissent and the Art of Documentary,” Sara Blair analyzes the redirection of photo-documentary practice by visual artists Richard Avedon and Martha Rosler. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the self-consciousness with which postwar figures represent and conduct their labor for a context of urgent social crisis and dissent. Both photographers experiment with the properties and forms of documentary imaging, wrested from its familiar contexts: Avedon in an evolving series of portraits of New Left leaders, activists, war prosecutors, and dissidents made in the United States and on the ground in Vietnam, Rosler in projects focusing on the role of photojournalism, documentary, and the media itself in perpetuating both a fog of war and a set of presumptions about documentary as a form of knowledge and power.

  PublisherDOI

• 6 Remediating the Lower East Side Dystopia and the Ends of Representation

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2018-04-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the Introduction, Sara Blair, Joseph Entin, and Franny Nudelman describe the volume’s interdisciplinary, historicist approach, and introduce the key concepts of “Documentary Making,” “Documentary Activism,” and “Documentary Time.” On the basis of this approach they find that many of the binaries that have traditionally organized discussions of documentary—between objectivity and subjectivity, realism and experimentalism, neutrality and participation, reformism and radicalism—prove to be fluid. They introduce an alternative model of documentary that cultivates and explores a dialectical relationship between documentarians, their subjects and the conditions they observe. From this perspective, documentary making is rarely solitary or univocal but rather “engaged” in the broadest sense as documentarians converse with their subjects, contend with events, critique their predecessors, and collaborate with other artists and activists. In this introduction, and the volume at large, struggle and participation take center stage, as documentarians reimagine their relationships to their subjects and audiences, and create innovative, experimental forms of art that can reanimate our sense of what documentary is, and what it can do in the world.

  PublisherDOI

• 3 What Becomes an Icon? Photography and the Poverty of Modernism

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4 Looking Back Henry Roth, Ben Shahn, and the Interwar Ghetto

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 Writers’ Blocks Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and the Territory of the Image

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-08-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How the Other Half Looks

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-06-05 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael Levenson

  6 shared

• Ross Posnock

  Columbia University

  4 shared

• Jonathan Freedman

  3 shared

• Marta Dykhuizen Shore

  University of Minnesota

  2 shared

• Christopher Innes

  2 shared

• Marianne DeKoven

  2 shared

• Franny Nudelman

  2 shared

• Joseph Entin

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship
• ACLS fellowship
• Michigan Humanities fellowship