Maura Coughlin is Teaching Professor in the Department of Art + Design where she teaches courses on Modern and contemporary art and visual culture with a special emphasis on ecocritical methodologies. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from New York University, a Master’s degree in Art History from Tufts University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History and in English from UMass Amherst. She joined Northeastern in 2022, before this she was Professor of Visual Studies at Bryant University.
Coughlin is co-editor with Emily Gephart of Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2019). In 2023, she was co-curator of the exhibition “A singularly marine & fabulous produce: the Cultures of seaweed” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. In the spring of 2025, her co-edited a special series of “Commentaries” were published in in American Art (Smithsonian) in a section dedicated to “Visualizing Resource Extraction”; she also contributed the essay “‘These cod factories’: A Plantation of North Atlantic Fish” to this project. She has essays forthcoming in 2025 in several collections: The Routledge Companion to Irish Art; Methods for Ecocritical Art History; The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture; and Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, 1750-1900.
Research/Publications Highlights
“Visualizing Resource Extraction, 1840-1910” (introduction to “Commentaries” section co-authored with Emily Gephart), American Art (Smithsonian) Spring, 2025. Pgs. 2-7.
“‘These cod factories’: A Plantation of North Atlantic Fish” American Art (Smithsonian) Spring, 2025. Pgs. 34-41.
‘“We do not live apart”: John Berger and the Radical Politics of Rural Life’” Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 65 | 2023, 1 October 2023, http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/13904
“Why Look at Dead Animals?” in NOTORIOUS, a special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal. 18 July 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12566
“Women of the West: Costumes, Ecologies and Allegories” in Eds. Fintan Cullen and Fiona Barber, The Routledge Companion to Irish Art. Routledge Art History and Visual Studies, 2025. Pgs. 254-265.
“Wrack Line Design: Seaweed in Visual Culture and Amateur Science in France” in Naomi Slipp and Maura Coughlin, A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed. New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2023. pgs 15-24.
“Reading the Wrack Line: Atlantic Flow on the Brittany Coast.” in Eds. Kathleen Davidson, Molly Duggins, Sea Currents: Art, Science and the Commodification of the Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century. Bloomsbury Academic Press, May 2023. Pgs. 101-120.
“Bovine Ubiquity” in Eds. Katie Hornstein and Daniel Harkett, Animal Modernities, Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, 1750-1900. Leuven University Press, June, 2025.
With Emily Gephart “Sacrifice Zones: Visualizing Material Extraction and Dis-placement” in Eds. Olga Smith and Andrew Patrizio, Methods for Ecocritical Art History. Manchester University Press, early 2026.
Departments
Art + Design
Education
- PhD, New York University, Modern Art History
- MA, Tufts University, Art History
- BA, UMass Amherst, Art History
- BA, UMass Amherst, English
Research Focus
- Ecocriticism
- Visual Studies
Courses Taught
- Modern Art and Design History
- Art and Ecology
- Still and Moving Image
- Visual Intelligence