Brigid Doherty, PhD, Arrives as Spring 2024 Erikson Institute Scholar-in-Residence

The Austen Riggs Center is pleased to welcome its Spring 2024 Erikson Scholar-in-Residence, Brigid Doherty, PhD. Since 1985, our Erikson Institute’s endowed scholar-in-residence program has brought a broad array of more than 50 individuals to the Center to carry out their scholarly research projects in conversation with the clinical staff.

While at Riggs, Doherty will explore engagements with early 20th-century psychoanalysis, psychology, and philosophy in the work of contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952), with a focus on a group of works the artist made in the early 1990s that are closely related to Hermann Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics: Methodology and Results of a Perceptual-Diagnostic Experiment (Eliciting Interpretations of Accidental Forms).

Doherty is associate professor of German and Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where she is also an associated faculty member in the School of Architecture and a member of the executive committees of the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Program in Media + Modernity. She previously taught in the Department of the History of Art and the Humanities Center (now the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature) at Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, she was the inaugural Research Forum Visiting Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute (London) and in 2019 she was Visiting Professor in the Institute for Philosophy and Sciences of Art at the Leuphana University (Lüneburg, Germany). While a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2006-07, Doherty was an Affiliate Scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. She earned her PhD in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and her AB in Modern Thought and Literature and Studio Art at Stanford University. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals and magazines including Critical Inquiry, October, MLN, Artforum, and Afterall, and in numerous exhibition catalogues of modern and contemporary art in Europe and the United States. She is a co-editor of Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Harvard, 2008). Her project, Learning Things, was featured in Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Trento, Italy.Her research has been funded by grants and fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty Research Institute, Fulbright Program, German Academic Exchange Service, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), and Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (Berlin).

To learn more about our scholar-in-residence program, visit: www.austenriggs.org/EriksonScholar

To learn more about Dr. Doherty, visit: https://artandarchaeology.princeton.edu/people/brigid-doherty