Nell Irvin Painter, a leading historian of the United States, is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University. In addition to her earned doctorate in history from Harvard University, she has received honorary doctorates from Wesleyan, Dartmouth, SUNY-New Paltz, and Yale.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nell Painter has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. Those presidential addresses have been published in the Journal of American History (“Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons” in March 2009) and the Journal of Southern History (“Was Marie White?” February 2008). The City of Boston declared Thursday, 4 October 2007 Nell Irvin Painter Day in honor of her Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center in 2006.

A prolific and award-winning scholar, her most recent books are Creating Black Americans. (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Southern History Across the Color Line (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). A second edition of Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 and a Korean translation of Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol appeared in 2008. Her four other books are also still in print. The History of White People (W. W. Norton) will be published in March 2010. For a complete list of her book and article publications and other honors and activities, please consult the CV on this website.

As a public intellectual, Professor Painter is frequently called upon for lectures and interviews on television and film. In January 2008 she appeared live for a three-hour “In Depth” program on C-SPAN Book TV. To see the program on the internet, go to the web page for “In Depth.” She has also appeared on Bill Moyers’s “Progressive America.” New Jersey Network’s “State of the Arts” documented her work as both a scholar and an art student.

Her agent at Greater Talent Network is Edna Schenkel: <ednas@greatertalent.com> or 877-662-9200

“Here is information on Nell Irvin Painter’s forthcoming book, The History of White People:”

The book can be pre-ordered from W. W. Norton and from online booksellers.

Nell Painter received a BFA degree in painting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey in May 2009 (while she was actually serving as a visiting professor at the University of Rome Tre).  She is currently an MFA student in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.”Here are some examples of her student artwork:

“The first half of 2009 proved too stressful to allow the production of much art work. But here are two hand-painted lithographic pieces from the spring semester.” 

 Hand colored lithograph, 3.5" x 8.0 x 3.0"


Hand colored lithograph 7.35" x 15"

2008

In November-December 2008 Nell Painter created a series of paintings inspired by Brooklyn photographs by Louise Fornasieri-Gold in the Brooklyn Historical Society. Here are four from that series, all 22” x 30”, ink and goauche on paper:

Dedication, another piece from November 2008, charcoal on paper, 11” x 85”. This drawing animates the dedication of Alison Saar’s Harriet Tubman monument in Harlem.
		The ten drawings of Dedication end with a close-up of the sculptor Alison Saar.

		This is the third of a five-panel ink and collage on paper drawing, Tuesday, celebrating the November 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama with images drawn from art history, Louise Fornasieri-Gold’s Brooklyn photographs, and photographs documenting the election from the New York Times.

Older Work

		Memory Piece was one of her projects in a relief printmaking class at SUNY-Plattsburgh in fall 2007.

		In her year-end review in the spring of 2007, the professors said the ineptness of this oil self-portrait showed she would never succeed as a painter of the figure.

		This dog sculpture from the spring of 2007 gave her great respect for the ability of animals to support themselves on their own four (or two) feet.