Faculty

Profile

Rory O’Dea is the Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Design & Interim Dean in the School of Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT). His scholarship explores the ways that visual art intersects with ecology, materiality, and speculative forms of fiction and theory as a means to produce alternative modes of knowledge and ways of being. His monograph titled Robert Smithson, Land Art, and Speculative Realities will be published by Routledge in October 2023, and he was awarded a research fellowship at the Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson Foundation in 2022. Recent and forthcoming scholarship appears in the edited volumes Entangled and Empowered: Agency in Multispecies Communities and Perspective: A Global Survey of Space Design in Art History, as well as the Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. His pedagogy is rooted in the intersection of theory and practice and explores the ways that art history can shape and is shaped by making and artistic research. In addition to serving as Associate Dean, Rory has served on and held leadership positions in the Parsons First Year Program, the Committee on Undergraduate Education, ADHT’s School Curriculum Committee, and the Middle States self-study. Prior to Parsons, Rory was a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art’s MFA program as well as a researcher at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. He received his PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Recent Publications

Robert Smithson, Land Art, and Speculative Realities (Routledge 2023)

"Robert Smithson: Becoming Geological," Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (Summer 2023)

Research Interests

Modern and contemporary art, visual culture, site specific practice; art and language, art and literature, art history and studio practice.