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Paul Jaskot

Co-Director, Duke Digital Art History & Visual Culture Lab; Professor of Art History

Paul B. Jaskot came to Duke in 2017 after many years of involvement with Digital Art History. He specializes in the history of modern German architecture and art, with a particular interest in the political history of architecture before, during, and after the Nazi era. He has also published on Holocaust Studies topics more broadly, modern architecture including the history of Chicago architecture, and methodological essays on Marxist art history. He has authored or edited several monographs and anthologies, including The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and, as co-editor, New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018).

Paul has also been deeply involved in Digital Art History issues since 2007, both as a scholar and as an advocate. In this role, he has been part of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative, an international team of scholars that has been exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze central problems in the spatial history of the Holocaust, including issues rising from the built environment. He has worked most closely with Anne Kelly Knowles (University of Maine), co-authoring several presentations and essays with her, for example, as part of the anthology Geographies of the Holocaust (University of Indiana Press, 2014), the first volume on the use of GIS for the study of the Holocaust. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources. They are currently working on an Historical GIS of the Ghetto System in Nazi Occupied Europe along with their colleague Anika Walke (Washington University). The Wired! project teams of Mapping German Construction and Mapping Occupied Krakow extend and complement this work. With Wired!, Jaskot is also part of the Dictionary of Art Historians team, as well as the Visualizing Cities collaborative.

From 2008-2010, he was the President of the College Art Association (CAA). With CAA, he has also participated in various task forces promoting the support of and guidelines for Digital Art History and its professional evaluation. He continues to be active with CAA and with the promotion of Digital Art History initiatives nationally.

Current Collaborations

Dictionary of Art Historians

Scholarship

Articles

Anne Kelly Knowles, Paul B. Jaskot, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano with assistance from Maël Le Noc, Paul Rayson, and Ian Gregory, “Mind the Gap: Reading Across the Holocaust Testimonial Archive,” in Tim Cole and Simone Gigliotti, eds., Lessons & Legacies XIV (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020): 216-41.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Digital Methods and the Historiography of Art.” In Kathryn Brown, ed., Digital Humanities and Art History (London: Routledge, 2020): 9-17.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Digital Art History as the Social History of Art: Towards the Disciplinary Relevance of Digital Methods.” Visual Resources 35, no. 1-2 (2019): 21-33. doi:10.1080/01973762.2019.1553651.

Jaskot, Paul B., Hannah L. Jacobs, Mark Olson, Victoria Szabo, and Edward Triplett. “Shaping the Discipline of Digital Art History: A recap of an advanced summer institute on 3-D and (geo)spatial networks.” The Iris. December 19, 2018. http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/shaping-the-discipline-of-digital-art-history/.

Jaskot, Paul B. and Ivo van der Graaff. “Historical Journals as Digital Sources: Mapping Architecture in Germany, 1914-24.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 4 (December 2017): 483-505. doi:/10.1525/jsah.2017.76.4.483.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Commentary: Art-Historical Questions, Geographic Concepts, and Digital Methods,.” Historical Geography 45 (2017): 92-99.

Jaskot, Paul B. and Anne Kelly Knowles. “Architecture and Maps, Databases and Archives: An Approach to Institutional History and the Built Environment in Nazi Germany.” The Iris. February 15, 2017. http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/dah_jaskot_knowles/.

Presentations

Jacobs, Hannah L., Paul Jaskot, Mark J. V. Olson, Victoria E. Szabo, and Edward Triplett. Presentation at “Coding Our Collection: Datathon,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, October 25, 2019.

Jacobs, Hannah L., Paul Jaskot, Mark J. V. Olson, Victoria E. Szabo, and Edward Triplett. “Advanced Topics in Digital Art History: 3D (Geo)Spatial Networks.” Panel presentations at the College Art Association Conference, New York, NY, February 13, 2019.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Digital Art History in the Moment of Barbarism: The Iconography of COVID-19.” Keynote for “Art History in Quarantine” (Virtual Conference), sponsored by the International Journal of Digital Art History. April 10, 2020.

Jaskot, Paul B. “The Scale of Architecture During the Holocaust: Digital Methods for Analyzing Building and Planning Goals in the German Occupation of the East (1939-1945).” Keynote for “Digital Humanities und das NS-Regime” (Conference), University of Bern, Switzerland, December 12, 2019.

Jaskot, Paul B., et al. “Grand Challenges of Art History: Digital/Computational Methods and Social Art History.” Colloquium convened at The Clark, Williamstown, MA, April 27, 2019.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Visualizing Krakow under Nazi Occupation: Exploring Digital and Analog Methods to Analyze the Built Environment of the Holocaust.” Emory University, Atlanta, March 28, 2019.

Jaskot, Paul B.“Visualizing Krakow under Nazi Occupation.” Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University, New York City, February 7, 2019.

Jaskot, Paul B. “A Plan, a Testimony, and a Digital Map: Analyzing the Architecture of the Holocaust.” Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto, Canada, March 12, 2018.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Scale and Ambiguity in the Digital Analysis of the Spaces of the Holocaust (or Why Bother Making an Art Historian a Member of Your Team).” Paper presented at the Research Computing Symposium, Duke University, Durham, NC, January 22, 2018.

Jaskot, Paul B., Anne Kelly Knowles, and Justus Hillebrand. “GIS and Corpus Linguistics: Mixed Digital Methods for the Exploration of Forced Labor in Krakow District Ghettos.” Paper presented at Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies, USC Shoah Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, October 23, 2017.

Jaskot, Paul B. “Using Digital Humanities to Understand the Architecture of the Holocaust.” Paper presented at the Digital Art History Lab Lecture Series, The Frick Collection, New York, NY, October 17, 2017.

Dissertations & Theses

Carrillo, Alan. “Modeling Ambiguity: An Analysis of the Paris Temple.” MA thesis, 2019. Halberstadt, Brittany. “Exiles and Abstract Expressionists: A Case Study of Influence with Analog and Digital Methods.” Undergraduate thesis, Duke University, 2020.

Leon, Emily. “Analyzing the Crisis of Hilma af Klint: The Digital and Analog Analysis of Spirituality, Abstraction, and Art.” MA thesis, Duke University, 2018.

Liu, Christine. “Mapping and Visualizing Testimonies of Spaces of Confinement: A Digital Analysis of the Kraków Ghetto.” MA thesis, Duke University, 2019.