Join the History of Art and Visual Culture program at CCA for our HAVC Writers Talk series: conversations between HAVC faculty members and invited guests about recent and ongoing research. 

On November 29th, at 3pm Pacific via Zoom, Professors Thomas O. Haakenson and Maria Makela will be discussing Professor Haakenson's latest book, Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada published in 2021 (Bloomsbury Press), which considers how Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity.

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture department at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco, CA, where he is also faculty in the Critical Studies Program and the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies. He holds a doctorate in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He is Visiting Faculty in the School of Fine Arts and Design at Philippine Women's University (Manila), and has been Visiting Faculty at the Freie Universität Berlin as well as the Humboldt Universität (Berlin, Germany). His current book projects include the monograph Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde (University of Michigan Press), as well as a collaborative project and series of publications with the title Dada Studies as Countercultural Practice with Brett M. Van Hoesen (University of Nevada Reno) and Kathryn Floyd (Auburn University).

Professor emerita at CCA, Maria Makela taught Visual Studies at the college from 2004-17, chairing that program from 2009-14. Author of The Munich Secession: Art and Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Munich (Princeton,1990) and co-author and editor of The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Walker Art Center, 1996), Maria is also the co-editor of two anthologies, one on Max Beckmann (Peter Lang, 2009) and one – Material Modernity (Routledge, 2022) – on the use of alternative media in interwar Germany. Her essays on individual artists and on topics as diverse as fashion, rayon, New Objectivity, Dada, Expressionism, film, nationalism, sexology, and typology have been published both nationally and internationally, and have been included in exhibition catalogues, edited anthologies, and periodicals. Maria also lectures widely on her work, much of which has been focused on gender and sexuality in visual culture.