Jennifer Sichel is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art & Theory at the University of Louisville's Hite Institute of Art and Design, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Public Humanities. A scholar of 20th and 21st-century art history, she focuses on practices that fall outside traditional genres of artmaking and develops methodologies in dialogue with queer and affect theory. She is the author of Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices (University of Chicago Press, 2025), shortlisted for the 2026 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in American art, and reviewed in Panorama, caa.reviews, Art History, the Brooklyn Rail, and Critique d'art.

Dr. Sichel has published scholarly and critical writing in Selva: A Journal of the History of Art and The Oxford Art Journal, as well as in exhibition catalogues including Sixties Surreal (The Whitney Museum), New York: 62-64 (The Jewish Museum), Andy Warhol Exhibits: A Glittering Alternative (mumok), and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Commonwealth Center for Humanities & Society, Clark Art Institute, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. In 2026, she received the Distinguished Faculty Award in Research - Creative & Performing Arts from the College of Arts & Sciences.

Across her teaching and scholarship, she works to expand the field of modern and contemporary art history to embrace practices that fall outside traditional genres, as well as queer methodologies. In collaboration with Miriam Kienle, she developed and organized the grant-funded symposium Queer Art Queer Archives (September 20-21, 2024)—a convening of scholars to investigate the theoretical stakes and methodological challenges of doing queer art history. Recent curatorial projects include MISSING: When East Village Artists Came to Main Street (Cressman Center, forthcoming 2026) and it was not written down: Stephen Irwin x Letitia Quesenberry (Cressman Center, 2024). Students in her curatorial practicum seminars have curated the exhibitions Doing Americana: Photography, Mythology, and the American Dream (2025) and Not Yet / Always Been: An Archive of Queer Louisville (2024).

Dr. Sichel's future work will continue to focus on practices that blur boundaries between art, criticism, and activism. Her current book project, with the working title Facing the Unbearable: Queer Art and Theory in the Nineties, investigates how artists and writers responded to the persistence of AIDS and its sociopolitical effects as the crisis-fueled urgency of the epidemic slid into the slow temporality of the endemic. Confronting art history’s tendency to tidy up the decade by privileging cool postmodern irony, on the one hand, or a legible politics of resistance, on the other, Facing the Unbearable excavates makeshift, experimental forms that evince other ways to survive an endemic.