Jennifer Van Horn is an Assistant Professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware. She teaches courses in American art, material culture, and museum studies. Her research interests range from George Washington’s dentures, to women’s embroidery, to wooden legs. Her current book project, Resisting the Art of Enslavement: Slavery and Portraiture in American Art, examines the connections between enslavement and portrait making and viewing in the 18th and 19th century plantation South. She has recently held senior fellowships at the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum and at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts) at the National Gallery of Art. She is the author of The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill, 2017) which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and received an honorable mention for the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has published articles in Art Bulletin, American Art, Early American Studies, and Winterthur Portfolio.
Professor Van Horn earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Delaware. A graduate of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, she worked on the curatorial staff at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and taught at George Mason University and the Corcoran’s MA Program in the History of Decorative Arts, before returning to the University of Delaware.