Tara Kohn

Tara Kohn completed her undergraduate work at Bowdoin College, and she received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. She specializes in 20th century art with a particular focus on migration and transnationality, shifting constructs of race and ethnicity, trauma and memory studies, and the history of photography. Her writing has appeared in American Art, Jewish Translation/Translating Jewishness—a volume she also co-edited—and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, among other places. Her work has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and her article “Elevated: Along the Fringes of 291 Fifth Avenue” was named Honorable Mention for the 2019 Director’s Essay Prize at the National Portrait Gallery. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Ancestral Time: Toward a Postnational History of the Photographic Book. Her study develops a critique of nationalism—both as a political structure and a framework for academic research and writing—through an exploration of Jewish loss in a collection of photographic books published in the United States across the twentieth century.