Phillippa Pitts

Phillippa Pitts received her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Boston University in 2026. Her research explores new ways of understanding American art and visual culture by expanding the kinds of objects, sources, and methods scholars use to tell its story. As a Hench Fellow, Pitts will develop her dissertation, Pharmacoepic Dreams: Art & America's Medical Democracy, 1800–1860, into a book. Drawing on disability studies, she articulates how medicines and ideas about health and wellness shaped American art as the new nation embraced a laissez-faire approach to medical care. By uncovering this deep yet overlooked current within American art, this project reveals how a more expansive application of disability studies can offer new perspectives on even exceptionally well-studied areas of art history. It also demonstrates how visual and material culture can illuminate voices and experiences that are often lost within traditional histories of science and medicine, providing approaches that can be useful to scholars across the health humanities.

Pitts’s research has been generously supported by the American Council of Learned Societies/Henry Luce Foundation; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Center for Advanced Visual Studies; the College Art Association; Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens; the Library Company of Philadelphia; William H. Clements Library at the University of Michigan; Oak Spring Garden Foundation; and the American Antiquarian Society, among others. Her writing has appeared in Panorama, MuseumsEtc, and The Journal of Museum Education, and is forthcoming in American Art and the Massachusetts Historical Review. Having returned to doctoral study from a decade in the museum field, Phillippa also maintains an active curatorial practice.