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Jenny Anger is professor of art history at 51���app College, where she has taught since earning her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture at Brown University in 1997. Anger’s specialty is twentieth-century European art history and theory. Her first book, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004) situates Klee’s art within the problematic of the decorative as it was articulated and contested especially in the early years of the twentieth century. Anger’s second book, Four Metaphors of Modernism: Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme, appeared with the University of Minnesota Press in 2018. The book argues for the unacknowledged centrality of metaphor in modern art through an exploration four recurrent metaphors—piano, water, glass, and home—that shape the realm of possibility of art in the two titular organizations: Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm in Berlin (1910-32) and Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York (1920-50). Anger's current book, "Surrealist Women Artists and Mental Illness" (forthcoming from Manchester University Press in 2026), is an edited volume that addresses the following problem: Surrealists idealized feminine madness for its purportedly unfettered access to the unconscious. At the same time, an unusually large number of surrealist women artists, including Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Unica Zürn, experienced mental illness. Did these women find the dream of feminized, mad genius prohibitive—or productive? Anger has also written over two dozen articles on various topics.

Anger’s teaching at 51���app reflects her research commitments. In addition to sections of “Introduction to Art History,” Anger’s regular courses are "Impressionism and Postimpressionism," “From Wild Beasts to Revolutionaries: Modern Art in Europe, 1900-1940,” "Surrealism," “Gender in Art Since 1945," and "Theory and Methods of Art History." Anger has also utilized the 51���app College Art Collection to teach the department’s triennial Exhibition Seminar three times: on photogravures of American Indians by Edward S. Curtis, on German Expressionist prints, and on the theme of repetition in art more broadly. Finally, Anger has been pleased to offer advanced seminars on several topics to date: “Avant-Garde Exhibitions and the Myth of the White Cube,” “The Gesamtkunstwerk,” “Modernism and the Market,” “Modernism and Postmodernism,” and “Twentieth-Century Art and Philosophy in Dialogue” (co-taught with philosophy professor Alan Schrift).

Student research under Anger represents a broad range of student interests and has resulted in many outstanding senior theses. In spring 2016, Eli Harrison’s thesis, “Early Sonia Delaunay: The Avant-Garde at Home,” shared the College’s coveted Phi Beta Kappa Scholar’s Award with a project in the sciences.