Emily Voelker

Education

Biography

Emily Voelker is a historian of photography and nineteenth-century art, whose work interrogates transatlantic exhibition culture, Native American representation, and changing meanings and uses of the archive over time. She is currently concluding her monograph, “Generations: Photography, Archives, and Sovereignty Across the Indigenous Atlantic.” The book analyzes photographs of Plains Indians either sent to or made at Paris exhibitions in the late nineteenth century as ongoing sites of negotiating tribal sovereignty. Her second book, a collaboration with Erin Hyde Nolan entitled, “Reading Native American Portraits in Ottoman: Global Economies of 19^th-century Survey Photography” similarly charts American practices in global purview, examining a decades-long photographic gift exchange between the US and Ottoman empires. These projects have been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution (NPG and NMAH), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research, among others. 

Voelker also maintains a publicly-interfacing scholarly practice. Recently she served as collaborator on the NHPRC-Mellon digital humanities grant “Wičhóoyake kiη aglí—They Bring the Stories Back: Connecting Lakota Wild West Performers to Pine Ridge Community Histories” (based at Oglala Lakota College, Pine Ridge Reservation, Kyle, SD) and on the curatorial council of the major show, In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890-Now (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Before obtaining her Ph.D., Voelker was the inaugural Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

Subjects Taught

• Histories of photography 
• 19^th-century art and visual culture 
• Art & visual culture of the Atlantic World 
• Indigenous arts of North America 
• American art & transnational American art 
• Critical museum & exhibition histories 
• Visual & photographic archives in theory & practice 

Selected Publications

“Maternal Orientalism: Women’s Work and the Photographs of Jessie Tarbox Beals at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” co-authored with Erin Hyde Nolan. In The Routledge Companion to Art and the Formation of Empire, edited by Emily C. Burns and Alice M. Rudy Price. New York: Routledge, 2025. 

“Rosalie Favell’s Photographic Revisitations: Indigenous Family Archives & Historical Memory.” In In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890-Now, edited by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Jaida Grey Eagle, and Casey Riley. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.  

“Translations/Reanimations/Presences: Omaha Tribal Historical Research Project and the Remaking of Umoⁿhoⁿ Archives.” In Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums, edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo and Yve Chavez. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022.  

“Reading Across American and Ottoman Archives: Diplomacy and Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” co-authored with Erin Hyde Nolan. In Transatlantic Cultures: Cultural Histories of the Atlantic World 18^th-21^st centuries, Digital Humanities Project (Paris: Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne Nouvelle, and São Paulo Universities, 2021). https://transatlantic-cultures.org/es/catalog/photographic-album 

“In the Round: Re-Reading American Photographs,” co-guest edited with Monica Bravo. In Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020). https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/re-reading-american-photographs/ 

“Unfixing the Frame: Visualizing Histories of Transcultural Contact, Exchange & Performance in Prince Roland Bonaparte’s Peaux-Rouges (1884),” special issue “Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France,” edited by Emily C. Burns and Agathe Cabau, Transatlantica (2|2017), online since 13 May 2019. https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/10822  

Related Websites

https://bringingstoriesback.olc.edu

https://new.artsmia.org/exhibition/in-our-hands-native-photography-1890-to-now