Rate My Professor Heather Waldroup

Dr. Heather Waldroup serves as Associate Director of the Honors College and Professor of Art and Visual Culture in Art History at Appalachian State University, where she also acts as Honors Academic Mentor for the College of Fine and Applied Arts, Humanities, and School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.A. and B.A. from Florida State University, and completed a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources at the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California. Waldroup's career at Appalachian State encompasses teaching, mentoring honors students, and administrative leadership in the Honors College and Department of Art.

Her scholarly work centers on the intersection of Western and Oceanic visual cultures from the late 19th century onward, with particular emphasis on colonial photography, contemporary Indigenous art, and practices of museum collection and display. She has pursued extensive field and archival research across the globe, including at the British Library in London and a women's fiber arts cooperative in the Cook Islands, and has experience as a cultural lecturer aboard a freighter ship in the Marquesas Islands. Currently, she is finalizing a book manuscript entitled Collecting the American Pacific: Photography and Empire, 1860-1920, under contract with the University of Hawai'i Press. Waldroup's peer-reviewed publications appear in journals such as Modernism/Modernity, History of Photography, Photography and Culture, Journeys, Women's History Review, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. Notable articles include "Hard to Reach: Anne Brigman, Mountaineering, and Modernity in California" (Modernism/Modernity, 2014), "Ethnographic Pictorialism: Caroline Haskins Gurrey's 'Hawaiian Types' at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition" (History of Photography, 2012), "Traveling Representations: Noa Noa, Manao Tupapau, and Gauguin's Legacy in the Pacific" (Journeys, 2010), and "Musée Gauguin Tahiti: Indigenous Places, Colonial Heritage" (International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2008). Additionally, she contributed to the edited volume Early Photography in Australia (2014) and co-contributed to the exhibition catalog Focus on Photographs: Building a Collection at Scripps College (2013). Waldroup has curated exhibitions such as Focus on Photographs: Building a Collection at Scripps College at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery (2013) and Sail! by Jewel Castro at the Catherine Smith Gallery, Appalachian State University (2011).