Erin Hyde Nolan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Maine College of Art & Design where she teaches courses on the history of photography, Islamic Art, and global modernism. She received her PhD from Boston University in 2017.
Hyde Nolan’s research interests focus on representations of identity and power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, exploring mobility and migration as constitutive supplements to how we read images. How has the circulation of photographs between Islamic and Euro-American lands defined notions of selfhood and cultural belonging? This question sits at the center of Hyde Nolan’s work.
Her articles on visual culture from the Islamic world have been published in academic journals such as Ars Orientalis and the Trans Asia Photography Review. Her current book project, Portrait Atlas: The Circulation of Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Portrait Photographs, lies at the intersection of Middle Eastern Studies, Art History, and Transnational histories. Two collaborative projects in which Hyde Nolan is currently engaged include: a co-edited volume, Survey Practice and Landscape Photography Across the Globe (Routledge, 2022), on photographic land surveys in the “majority world,” which is currently under review; and a co-curated exhibition, Outside of the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa, which presents a newly discovered collection of photographs by Webb that have yet to be exhibited or published in their original format. Made on the African continent in 1958, they present unique insight into eight countries at a critical interface between colonialism and independence. The exhibition will open at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in March 2021, traveling to other venues. It will be accompanied by a book of the same name and published by Thames & Hudson in 2021.
Most recently, she presented her work at the European Conference of Iranian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany (2019), Association for Art History, Annual Conference in Brighton, England (2019), the Ernst Herzfeld Society Thirteenth Colloquium at the University of Vienna, Austria (2017) and The Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester, England (2017).
Her scholarship has been supported by the Kunsthistorisches Institut-Florenz, Max-Planck Society, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Historians of Islamic Art, and Getty Research Institute, among others. Before attending graduate school, Hyde Nolan worked at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Harvard Art Museums, the Morgan Library & Museum and Todd Webb Archive.
She lives in Portland, Maine with her family.