About

Erin Hyde Nolan is a photo historian who engages lens-based media throughout the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College where her classes center around questions of vision and technology: who is seeing and who is being seen? Working across diverse lens-based media in the modern period, her teaching emphasizes the cultural contingency of visual representation, and mutable meaning of material objects within changing political contexts.  Hyde Nolan’s courses examine the transnational circulation of image technologies in order to decenter dominant narratives and artistic origin stories from Europe and the United States, constellating image histories that are international, inclusive, and collaborative.

Her monograph-in-progress, Portrait Atlas: The Migration of Photographs Across the Ottoman-Atlantic, maps the ways in which images from the modern Middle East intersect with trans-Atlantic geographies. She is the co-author, with Sophie Junge, of Survey Practices and Landscape Photography Across the Globe (Routledge, 2022), and with Aimée Bessire, of Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa (Thames & Hudson 2021) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.

She is currently a fellow with the Khamseen’s Getty project “The Futures of Islamic Art History: Remapping the Field.” Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Terra Foundation for American Art, Getty Research Institute, and Max-Planck-Institut, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

EDUCATION:

2017 Ph.D. Boston University, History of Art and Architecture

2012 M.A. Boston University, History of Art and Architecture

2004 B.A. Tufts University, History of Art and Architecture and English

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

“Imagined landscapes and Istanbul’s Modern Machine Rooms,” in Mediterranean Mobilities after 1800: Visual and Material Approaches to Infrastructure, ed. Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Anna Sophia Messner, and Shraddha Bhatawadekar, Heinrich-Heine-Universität [De Gruyter, 2027 – forthcoming]

“And the Landscape Grows Back: Photographic Futurity in the work of Gohar Dashti,” in “Global Archives of Empire and Photographic Futurity” special issue of Photography & Culture, ed. by Erin Hyde Nolan and Emily Voelker, 2026 

“Ottoman Time-scapes: Photo-collage as Diplomacy,” in Ottoman Cultural Mobilities: 19th Century Modes of Travel, Collecting and Display, ed. by Belgin Turan Ozkaya and Sibel Zandi-Sayek (De Gruyter, 2026)

“Maternal Orientalism: Women’s Work and the Photographs of Jessie Tarbox Beals at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,” co-authored with Emily Voelker in Art and Empire: Imperialism and Aesthetic Practices, 1865-1945, ed. by Emily Burns and Alice Price (Routledge, 2025) 

Survey Practice and Landscape Photography Across the Globe co-edited by Sophie Junge (London: Routledge, November 2022).

“Transatlantic Collaborations in the Colonial Archive: Todd Webb’s 1958 UN Commission,” co-authored with Aimée Bessire and Halfan Hashim Magani in Fotogeschichte, special issue on “Photography and Colonialism,” edited by Sophie Junge, January 2022.

Outside of the Frame: Todd Webb’s 1958 Photographs of Africa for the United Nations co-edited with Aimée Bessire (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021).

“Reading Native American Portraits in Ottoman: A Networked Analysis of Photographs in the Abdülhamid II Collection” co-authored with Emily Voelker on Transatlantic Cultures Digital Platform, https://tracs-edition.univ-lr.fr/app/en/index (2021)