Maria Gough’s primary area of research and teaching is early 20thC European art, with special attention to the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes, Weimar aesthetics, and French modernism. Tackling problems in the history of abstraction, drawing, para-architecture, photography, print media, propaganda, exhibition design, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Gough’s research has appeared in journals such as October, New German Critique, Modernism/modernity, Parkett, Artforum, RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, the Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne, and many exhibition catalogues. Her book on the Constructivist debates of the 1920s, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, was published by the University of California Press in 2005. She is currently completing two book manuscripts: The first is on the drawings of Gustavs Klucis (How to Make A Revolutionary Object), the other on the photographic practices of foreign travelers in the Soviet Union during the 1930s (The Soviet Photographic Utopia of Radical Tourism). She also writes occasionally about post-war and contemporary art, including on such topics as the work of Tatiana Trouvé, Frank Stella, On Kawara, Buckminster Fuller, Josiah McElheny, and Monika Sosnowska.

Among her most recent essays are:

—“Please Read,” in A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy: After the Bauhaus and Before the Internet, ed. Geoff Kaplan (New York: No Place Press, 2022)

—“Sophie Taeuber’s Camera Peripatetica,” in Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction, eds. Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2021)

—“Portrait Under Construction: Lotte Jacobi in Soviet Russia and Central Asia”(October 173 [summer 2020])

—“Brothers in Arms: The Making and Migration of Black and White Unity,” in John Heartfield: Photographie plus Dynamit (Berlin: Hirmer Verlag, 2020)

—“Three Workers’ Club Drawings by Elena Semenova” and “Gustav Klutsis’ Electrification of the Entire Country” in Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2020)

Her research has been generously supported by a Paul Mellon Predoctoral Fellowshipfrom CASVA (1992-1995), postdoctoral fellowships from the Getty Grant Program (2000-2001), Clark Art Institute (2001), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2011-2012), Guggenheim Foundation (2015-2016), and Graham Foundation (2017), as well assabbatical leaves from the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Harvard University.

In addition to contributing to the co-taught Gen-Ed survey “Modern Art & Modernity (1730-1980), Gough teaches a lecture course on “Modern Art and Its Colonial Matrix,” which examines the development of modernism in the visual arts through the lens of the European quest for empire. She regularly offers research seminars on avant-garde art and architectural drawing, photography between the two world wars, Cubism, the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes, and the Bauhaus. Her most recent teaching foregrounds the pioneering role of textiles produced by women in the development of modern and contemporary art, especially abstraction.

She is a member of the editorial or advisory boards of Modernism/modernity, Power Publications, and Grey Room. She is also a member of the Board of Advisors of The Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (2020-2023). At Harvard she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Interim Chair.

Gough studied law, philosophy, and history of art at the University of Melbourne (1987), before completing an MA in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins (1991) and a PhD in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard (1997). Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2009, she served as William Wilhartz Assistant Professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan (1996-2003) and Associate Professor of Art History at Stanford University (2003-2009).