Rate My Professor Alexander Nemerov

A distinguished scholar of American culture, Nemerov examines art's emotional truths and ethical demands through close readings of history, philosophy, poetry, and visual culture. His publications include The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s (Princeton University Press, 2023); Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York (Penguin, 2021, short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Biography); Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (Princeton University Press, 2016, short-listed for the Marfield Prize); Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (Princeton University Press, 2012, Choice Outstanding Academic Title); Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (University of California Press, 2010, Choice Outstanding Academic Book); Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005); The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (University of California Press, 2001); and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (Yale University Press, 1995, Choice Outstanding Academic Book). He delivered the 66th Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2017—the first focused on American art—and the Andrew Wyeth Lecture there in 2007. Awards include the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History (2019), Dean’s Award (Stanford, 1998-1999), and an honorary degree from the University of Vermont (2017). Nemerov has curated exhibitions including Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center (2016) and To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2011). The Stanford Daily named him one of the university’s top ten professors, and he delivered Stanford’s 2025 Baccalaureate address.