Marcia Brennan

Marcia Brennan

Marcia Brennan, Ph.D. is Professor of Art History and Religious Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University. Her research engages modern and contemporary art history and museum studies; mysticism and comparative religion; and the emerging field of the medical humanities. She is the author of several scholarly books, including Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (MIT Press, 2010); Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson (Rice University Press, 2009); Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (MIT Press, 2004); Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2001). In addition, she is the lead author of the Menil Collection’s twentieth-anniversary exhibition catalog, A Modern Patronage: de Menil Gifts to American and European Museums (Yale, 2007); and she is the lead author of the exhibition catalog Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me (Houston: Ineri Publishing and The Station Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011). She is also the author of a book of inspirational writings, The Day Your Heart Broke In Your Eyes: The Book of Recognition (Blue Dolphin, 2011). She is the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Office of Research, Rice University, and Rice’s Humanities Research Center. In both 2009 and 2010 she was awarded the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching.
In addition, Marcia Brennan also serves as an Artist In Residence in the Department of Palliative Medicine at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Her experiences in this clinical setting represent the subject of her current book project, Words Beyond Words: Finding Language at the End of Life (forthcoming from Intellect Books, U.K.).


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