Michael Leja

Michael Leja is a leading historian of American visual culture whose work spans painting, sculpture, photography, film, and print media of the 19th and 20th centuries. His scholarship explores how visual artifacts intersect with cultural, social, political, and intellectual currents, with a particular focus on the dynamic relationships between art and its audiences.

He is the author of Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (1993), which won the Smithsonian’s Charles Eldredge Prize, and Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (2004), awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. His most recent book, A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States (2025), traces the emergence of mass-produced images in the mid-19th century and their transformative effects on American cultural life.

Leja has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008) and the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award (2025). He is serving as the Leonard A. Lauder Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2025–2026.