Baradel taught in the School from autumn quarter 2017 through spring quarter 2019.
I am a historian of the art and visual culture of the present-day United States from the colonial period through the twentieth century, with particular research and teaching interests in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painting and the history of world's fairs.
My current book project, Painting at the Threshold: Mobility and Identity in American Genre Painting, explores the ways artists and audiences probed discourses of geographic mobility and identity in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement, my research shows how artistic experimentation with form and narrative shaped public debates about space and identity during a period in which political, economic, and technological developments spurred an unprecedented flow of people and goods.
My research has been generously supported by fellowships from the Wyeth Foundation / Smithsonian American Art Museum, Henry Luce Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among others. In 2016, I received the Emerging Scholars Award from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. Prior to joining the University of Washington, I taught courses in American art at Vassar College and was a Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art.
