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About Neil
Neil Harris is the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History, Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago, where he joined the faculty in 1969 and taught until his retirement in 2008. A cultural historian, he has focused on American art, artists, and art collecting; the history of technology, architecture, and design; American entertainment; world's fairs; and the development of American museums, libraries, and learned societies. He earned undergraduate degrees from Columbia University in 1958 and Cambridge University in 1960, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1965. Harris served twice as chair of the History Department, from 1985 to 1988 and from 2000 to 2001. He has held prestigious visiting positions, including Visiting Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1985, Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer in 1986, Getty Scholar in 1990-91, and Distinguished Scholar at the National Museum of American Art in 1995-96. Harris has delivered named lectures at institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Stanford Universities.
His major publications include The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (1966), Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (1973), Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (1990), Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: The Transportation Revolution in Children's Picture Books (1995), Building Lives: Constructing Rites and Passages (1999), Chicago Apartments: A Century of Lakefront Luxury (2004), The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (2008), Cultural Capital: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience (2013), and En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I (2014, with Teri Edelstein). Harris has authored more than one hundred papers and reviews since 1962. Among his honors are the Harvard GSAS Centennial Medal (2022), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1999-2000), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), Joseph Henry Medal of the Smithsonian Institution (1990), Lawrence A. Fleischman Award from the Archives of American Art (2008), and Iris Foundation Award (2010). He has served on boards of the Terra Foundation for American Art, Newberry Library, Art Institute of Chicago, and others, and on editorial boards including Winterthur Portfolio and American Quarterly. Harris's scholarship has pioneered the field of cultural history, illuminating key developments in American visual and material culture.
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