Matthew Fox-Amato

Matthew Fox-Amato

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2014-2016)

CURRENT POSITION

Associate Professor, History Department, University of Idaho

PROFILE

Matthew Fox-Amato is a cultural historian of the United States and a historian of visual and material culture. His book manuscript — Slavery, Photography, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America — is under contract with Oxford University Press. Drawing upon an original source base that includes unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists as well as written archival materials, this project revises our understanding of the experience of late slavery (by putting visual culture at the center) as it simultaneously rethinks the relation between early photography and racialized forms of power and resistance. The manuscript is based upon his dissertation, which was the runner-up for the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize and the winner of the McNeil Center’s prestigious Zuckerman Prize for 2014 — awarded to “the best dissertation connecting American history (in any period) with literature and/or art.”

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Slavery, Photography, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (under contract with Oxford University Press)

Interview with Process History on Slavery, Photography and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics.

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Philosophy, Kingston University, London, 2011
Mphil., Social Anthropological Research, University of Cambridge, 2006
B.A., Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 2005