Few scholars bring as much insight into transnational art history and the representation of Native American material culture as Emily C. Burns. A leading historian of nineteenth-century visual culture, Burns’s interdisciplinary research traces the circulation of art and artists, particularly between the U.S., France, and Indigenous communities. For example, in her deeply engaging and insightful book Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France (2018), she examines how the imagery of the American West shaped identity narratives and how Native artists asserted survivance within these frameworks. Her work not only illuminates the past but also reshapes understandings of cultural exchange, representation, and identity.
In fall 2024, Burns joined Masaryk University’s Department of Art History as a visiting researcher, collaborating with scholars from the Centre for Modern Art & Theory and the Centre for Early Modern Studies. A highlight of her stay was her December lecture Belonging: Rethinking Native American Art on Display at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which underscored the importance of reclaiming Native material culture as living expressions of identity, resistance, and knowledge transmission.
In this interview, she reflects on her academic journey, methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary research, as well as her upcoming book projects and teaching philosophy.
What first inspired your interest in art history, and how did your academic journey lead you to focus on the transnational nineteenth century?
I started taking art history in my first semester of college, and I found it fascinating because you could study anything through material forms from any period or culture. It also seemed like the most interdisciplinary subject because the questions you ask depend on the objects you choose.
When I applied for an MA, I decided to focus on American art. Throughout graduate school, I kept returning to questions of circulation and exchange. For me, some of the most interesting questions in art history involve what happens when people move through space and across cultures and when artworks circulate. I became interested in expatriate artists, those who were constantly travelling or those whose artwork was dynamically moving. I also became fascinated by intermediate translations—not only how paintings travel but also how photographs of paintings and illustrations become part of that story.
What drew you to studying the art of the American West and its transatlantic connections with France?
I became increasingly interested in France because it was a place Americans visited so avidly in that period. White American artists were „playing Indian“ in Paris a lot. When I wanted to study the American artist colony in Paris, I was told that it had already “been done” by works like Lois Marie Fink’s American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (1990) and Barbara Weinberg’s The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (1991).
That feedback pushed me to think about why I felt the topic wasn’t fully explored. The reason was that those studies focused on what was materially on view and how American art was stylistically influenced by French academic styles and Impressionism. But I was more interested in cultural studies questions—how did French people understand the United States and American culture? How did this visible group of American artists in Paris shape ideas of Americanness? And these questions still haven’t been answered.
This led to my dissertation project and the theme of cultural innocence—the idea of the U.S. being behind, delayed, or „still arriving.“ This is also the theme of my current book project.
How did your research on Native American stereotypes evolve into a deeper engagement with Native American culture and perspectives?
When I came to think about how Lakota performers travelling in Europe disrupted the performance of “Indianness” by White U.S. artists, I began to talk with Lakota community members and work with archives at the Oglala Lakota College on Pine Ridge Reservation. Meeting descendants of Lakota performers I write about has been incredibly powerful. The stories shared by community members have helped me better understand the past and archival materials that didn’t quite make sense to me. These relationships have been really rewarding and propelled me to work more on Native American art in subtler contexts.
My next book project explores the collection and representation of Native American material forms in settler spaces, such as museums or exhibitions, and paintings where those material forms are being re-rendered by White artists.
You emphasize the importance of community dialogue in the study of Native American belongings. What do you consider the most effective methodological approaches for engaging with these objects?
Native American belongings require a different analytical framework – one that actively redresses historical oppression by centering the makers‘ and community members‘ knowledge about what belongings are and what they do. These knowledge systems are distinctive from those of the Western academy and have long been oppressed by presumptions that they represent “myth” rather than cultural truths.
Recognizing that the boundaries between sacred and secular are often fluid, I deliberately avoid working on spiritually centered belongings whose power may be diminished through scholarly analysis. The right to opacity is a crucial aspect of ethical engagement, and I determine these designations through dialogue with community members.
In what ways can museums and exhibitions responsibly display Native American belongings, and how can they collaborate with Indigenous communities to ensure respectful and accurate representation?
I appreciate that many exhibitions are increasingly moving away from enclosing Native American belongings in cases. The Knowing the West show at Crystal Bridges, for example, features many Native American works placed on pedestals without a covering. To me, this honours a recognition that belongings are animate and would be confined in boxes.
Finally, I think a lot about how to amplify the work of Indigenous colleagues and knowledge sharers, ensuring that I only share what has been shared with me with permission.
In fall 2024, you conducted research at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University. What drew you to Brno for this research stay?
I have followed Marta Filipová’s scholarship for a long time. She’s done such great work on world’s fairs, which are crucial to my research as spaces of cultural performance. They help us think about how cultures self-represent or represent others and how material forms circulate and are recontextualized. I was excited to be in dialogue with her research group and other students exploring cultural nationalism and production.
Additionally, I knew Tomáš Valeš and Jan Galeta from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. Their research on the legacies of early modern architecture in the nineteenth century resonated with my interests in how styles change and what they signify in new contexts.
And it was such a great visit—I only wish it had been longer! I am energized by going to new places. Perhaps it’s because I like to see movement, and for me, enacting movement and cultural exchange reaffirms and helps frame those research questions. Having the opportunity to be in dialogue with colleagues working on similar questions was also energizing. I loved my conversations with the Centre for Modern Art and Theory and the Centre for Early Modern Studies and will look forward to future collaborations with colleagues from both.
What projects were you focused on during your time at Masaryk University?
My main focus was writing. I was completing my Performing Innocence book project and working on the Belongings project. I also explored Moravia’s history in the broader Czech and Czechoslovakian context. It’s not necessarily something I intend to research and publish about, but being in Brno, visiting museums, and talking to people is helpful in thinking about another case study where culture and identity are layered. Also, a colleague of mine who is an artist in the U.S. had an exhibition of his prints related to his family’s textile production in Czechoslovakia in Břeclav; it was fun to visit this show and think about how artists are also engaging the legacy of cultural identity and its disruption.
Your Performing Innocence project explores how the notion of American cultural innocence has been constructed over time. How do these narratives continue to shape American identity today, and what impact do they have on contemporary political and social discourse?
Many nineteenth-century stereotypes and assumptions about American culture are still true today. Repeated uncritical claims that American culture is “young” trouble me; constructions of nations as if they are following human life cycles seem to me to obscure politics and deny histories of oppression.
I think that the claim of American innocence suppresses our culpability for racism, oppression, settler colonialism, and continued inequities in American society. There is this language of cultural exceptionalism, and the idea of being innocent or young basically makes it impossible for people to be guilty or inherit the guilt of our ancestors for those transgressions. Innocence does a lot of political work in American society today, and I hope that examining it through the lens of art history will help people see the myth-making behind it and reveal how deeply embedded it remains in the national consciousness.
In this way, the research invites some cultural self-critique that may not be welcome in some spaces. People don’t necessarily want to talk about these histories, but I think art history risks becoming irrelevant if all we do is talk about how material form changes over time without embedding it in these larger discursive concerns or tracing their legacy.
As someone who teaches about American art and the art of the American West, what approaches do you use to make these topics accessible to students?
I think accessibility is one of the most important parts of teaching in art history—it can often seem to students as a foreign language. I always try to begin with art history’s tools in visual analysis and contextual analysis, no matter the subject. I often find that once students realize how much they can notice just by looking at an artwork and how studying context can open up so much meaning, they can get excited about any content.
I also try to emphasize the multiplicity of makers from various backgrounds to counter the traditional canon. Teaching transcultural and transnational case studies shows how much dialogue there is across the world, even in earlier periods. As James Clifford points out, culture shows us that society is not only rooted but also often routed!
What advice would you give students interested in pursuing art history, particularly with a focus on transnational or interdisciplinary studies?
Be open to the academic journey and let the artworks that most compel or interest you guide your research. For me, it’s the artworks that seem contradictory, or that can be read in layered ways that most catch my interest.
Big advice is to ensure that you aren’t only reading within the field of art history. Reading in history, cultural studies, geography, literature, film histories, philosophy, art theory and criticism, and political science – all of these propel deeper, richer, and more complex readings of art history.
Also, think about the field as an ongoing conversation; no subject is ever „finished,“ no matter how grand or complete a factual book about them might be. The same terrain can be revisited via new questions or angles. For instance, when I initially began to work on U.S. artists in Paris, some of my mentors warned me that there were already books on the subject. That forced me to clarify what questions I was asking that were unique; in that case, I was less interested in the technical influence of French painting on American artists and much more interested in how this contingent of conspicuous Americans constructed ideas of cultural nationalism in Paris. If you and I had the same archive or the same artworks and were tasked to write a book drawing on them, we would come to radically distinct projects. That also speaks to the richness of the individual human mind!
Lastly, as you get started, I would encourage you to be flexible and bold when looking for opportunities. Some of my earliest positions – doing quality control on a digitization project or working in a local art gallery or tiny city historical society and archive – gave me experiences that helped me be competitive for bigger museum positions.
Who are some of the scholars or thinkers who have influenced your approach to art history?
I love this question and have too many answers. I have read many of John Berger’s essays and I find them meditative and compelling, as they reveal the ineffable, deeply human meanings embedded in material forms.
I also love reading about mobility, identity, and the fungible role of culture in society. Homi Bhabha’s writings have been a favorite in this regard, and Martha Langford’s anthology, Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World, offers nuanced perspectives on these themes.
I frequently return to Danika Medak-Saltzman’s work on thinking through archival silences to find alternative perspectives that push against dominant narratives, Tamar Garb’s on needing to move the centre when we consider global nineteenth-century histories and Partha Mitter’s on decentring modernism. And many others!
Have you encountered any works of art that have moved you to tears?
I have returned again and again to one of Al Parker’s paintings of a man in a bathrobe staring intently at the moon at an exhibition at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis. Sometimes the research of context moves me to emotion – like painter Ellen Emmet Rand’s half-brother Grenville’s untimely death by suicide as the conclusion to a study of their collaborative drawing book when he was a child. Arthur Amiotte’s Wounded Knee collage that combines photographs of the massacre taken by photojournalists with his own photographs of the site in 2001 is another artwork that has evoked deep emotion when I study or teach it.
What upcoming projects are you particularly excited about?
After completing my book on U.S. artists in Paris, I’m turning to a new project on the collection and display of Native American belongings in settler contexts – whether artists‘ studios and paintings, anthropological exhibitions, or Wild West shows. I argue that scholars have often reinforced the settler imaginary by treating Native American material forms as „artefacts“ or „objects,“ denying their ontological status as animate, relational entities. This perspective presumes that belongings‘ lives are ended when material forms are repurposed in settler spaces or represented by White artists. Instead, we might consider viewing such representations as transnational, dialogic – sites of negotiation between competing epistemological systems.
Also forthcoming in 2025 are two edited volumes from Routledge that I’ve worked on with art historian Alice M. Rudy Price. These books explore art and empire between 1800 and 1950 from a global perspective. The first examines how art functioned as a tool for consolidating imperial power, while the second focuses on the afterlives of empire and how art has been used to challenge and unravel imperial ethos. Bringing together around twenty essays in each volume, we aim to foster comparative methodologies across often siloed subfields in art history.
