Rate My Professor Thomas McDonough

Thomas McDonough is a professor of art history in the Arts and Culture faculty at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he joined the Art History Department in 1999 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 2006, and became full professor in 2022. He also serves as adjunct curator at the Binghamton University Art Museum. McDonough earned a BA with highest honors from Rutgers University in 1991, an MA in 1993, and a PhD in 1998 from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His dissertation, “The Construction of Reserve: Urbanism and Experience in Rousseau’s Paris,” was advised by Linda Nochlin. A scholar of modern and contemporary art, his research interests include postwar European avant-gardes with particular emphasis on the Situationist International, postwar French architectural and urban history, and contemporary Black American art. He has taught as a visiting associate professor at Harvard University in 2014 and at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008-09.

McDonough's key publications encompass books such as Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (MIT Press, 2002), The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (MIT Press, 2007), The Situationists and the City: A Reader (Verso, 2009), Boredom (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2017), and Ed Wilson: The Sculptor as Afro-Humanist (Binghamton University Art Museum, 2024). He has contributed articles to OCTOBER, including “Situationist Space” (1994) and “The Crimes of the Flâneur” (2002), and co-edited The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester University Press, 2006). His achievements include the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities (2024), Scholar-in-Residence at the Académie de France à Rome/Villa Medici (Spring 2015), Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Getty Grant Program (2004-05), fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Binghamton University (Fall 2021), and Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2000-01).