Erin Hyde Nolan
Erin Hyde Nolan is a historian who studies lens-based media and visual culture throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Across these geographies, she investigates the cross-cultural circulation of images, objects, and ideas, considering how modes of artistic exchange open alternate frameworks of meaning and reception for modern technologies of vision. Working within a networked history of art—one that recognizes the borders of empire and nation as porous—her research and teaching emphasize photography’s itinerant nature and explore the spaces where images connect continents, countries, and cultures. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College.
Her monograph-in-progress, Portrait Atlas: The Migration of Photographs Across the Ottoman-Atlantic, demonstrates the ways in which photographs from the Islamic world cross-pollinate trans-Atlantic geographies, unsettling a place-bound approach to portraiture. She is also the co-author, with Sophie Junge, of Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe(Routledge, 2022), and has published in the Routledge Companion to Art and Formation of Empire, Trans-Asia Photography, Ars Orientalis, Reading Objects in the Contact-Zone, and Fotogeschichte.
Her archival and field research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, Historians of Islamic Art, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, and the Getty Research Institute.
She presents regularly at international forums, and most recently, spoke at the MEDMACH Conference (2025), International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference (2024), College Art Association Annual Conference (2024), Other Histories of Photography Symposium at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia (2023), University of North Carolina, Greensboro, School of Art (2023), University of Zurich (2022), Ottoman Cultural Mobilities Workshop at the British Institute & Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (2021), Expanding Islamic Art History Conference at the University of Vienna (2021) and Silver Atlantic Conference in Paris (2021).
In the classroom, Hyde Nolan asks her students to consider questions of vision: who is seeing and who is being seen? Working across diverse lens-based media in the modern period, she emphasizes the cultural contingency of visual representation, decentering dominant narratives orartistic origin stories from Europe and the United States and constellating histories of image-making that are international, inclusive, and collaborative.