Lucian Gomoll is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, his M.A. in Performance Studies at New York University, and his B.A. (Honors) in Women’s Studies and Literature with minors in Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
His book manuscript, Performativity and Difference in Museums, historicizes and theorizes various ways that bodies have been incorporated into exhibitions and archives. He resists a common presentism and rhetoric of “the new” in discussions of performance, interactivity, and experience in museums, connecting recent trends to ways that bodies have been displayed and collected since the early nineteenth century.
Gomoll’s research has been previously supported by a Eugene Cota-Robles (UC Diversity) Presidential Fellowship, a James and Sylvia Thayer Fellowship, an Irvine Memorial Fellowship, a Porter Fellowship, and an Institute for Humanities Research Dissertation Fellowship.
He served as Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies (MACS) at UC Santa Cruz from 2009-2012, hosting lectures by distinguished scholars such as Griselda Pollock, Amelia Jones, and Irit Rogoff. In 2010, he organized with Lissette Olivares the international conference The Task of the Curator: Translation, Intervention and Innovation in Exhibitionary Practice, which was lauded as a “landmark event” by the UCLA International Institute.