Emma Woods

Emma Woods studies modern and contemporary art, with particular interest in how conditions of displacement shape artistic form. Her research draws on theories of drawing, diaspora studies, and gender and kinship. Her dissertation takes up statelessness and postwar American art through the work of Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg, two Romanian émigrés who shared a household and a milieu while arriving at divergent formal solutions. It asks whether drawing, understood as a mode of knowing rather than a material support, offered both artists a form adequate to a life in which identity could no longer be certified.