Samuel Allen

PhD Candidate

Areas of interest: History of photography, particularly in northern California between the wars; photography and artwork reproduction; modern and contemporary American and European art.

Samuel Allen is a PhD candidate who focuses on photographic histories grounded in cultural, intellectual, and economic currents of images’ places of origin. His dissertation considers a diverse corpus of photographs—including artworks, documentary series, and government surveys—created in northern California from the late 1920s through 1941. Through this work, his project surfaces a concern with history and temporality within a regional photographic scene more often associated with formalist experimentation and humanist studies of society. Allen is currently a Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art. He has recently served on curatorial teams at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Art.