Esther Thyssen

Esther T. Thyssen studied art history at Lake Forest College and Yale University, receiving her PhD from Yale in 1999. She was Fulbright Guest Professor of American Studies at Debrecen University in Hungary in 2006 and at the University of Bucharest in Romania in 2018. Her research interests are in the construction of modernism in Europe and the Americas and the revision of the history of art in east and central Europe prior to 1989. She is currently researching the movement of art and artists across the former Iron Curtain, as well as abstraction and new media art during the 1970s. At RISD she teaches Global Modernisms, Early 20th Century Art and Abstract Expressionism in Global Politics.