Michelle McCoy

I am a historian of Chinese and Inner Asian art focusing on transcultural exchange and art’s relationship to religion and science. My current research is rooted in the era leading up to the 13^th-century Mongol conquest of Eurasia, a period when China was ruled by culturally diverse competing states that was pivotal in the formation of art historical categories often taken for granted today. I am committed to the critical issue of art history as a global discipline, and my background in studio practice, modern and contemporary art, and transcultural feminism informs ongoing investments in artistic process, public exhibitions, and perspectives that have been historically marginalized.

My recent courses in the department include an introduction to the material culture of the “Silk Road” through seminal objects of cultural exchange (e.g., the book, the Buddhist icon, and indeed silk), and graduate seminars on art history and eco-critique and theories and methods in the discipline. Undergraduate seminars have addressed Chinese art in the University Art Gallery collection, which resulted in a 2019 pop-up exhibition, and histories of the Frick Fine Arts Building, our department’s physical home, that center on Indigenous and other communities displaced or marginalized by settler institutions such as Pitt.

I am presently developing two major research projects. The first, “A Sky with No Frontiers: Art, Religion, and Astrology along the Eastern Silk Road,” is a book about the role of the stars and planets in art across the Khitan, Song, Tangut, and Jurchen states (ca. 10th to 13th centuries CE). It examines how seemingly arcane and culturally discrete forms of astrology and astronomy transformed Buddhist, Daoist, and mortuary art. The second project is an exhibition on depictions of the cosmos and the afterlife at the medieval Buddhist grotto site of Dunhuang, a key point of transcultural convergence and repository of artwork produced continuously for roughly a millennium.  

I am an ongoing contributor to two international research groups that promote in-depth scholarly dialogue across fields, disciplines, and institutions: Visualization and Material Culture of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa (4000 BCE–1700 CE) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Global Horizons in Premodern Art, funded by the European Research Council and based at the University of Bern. I regularly collaborate with the Dunhuang Foundation, and, at Pitt, am affiliated with Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Note to prospective graduate students: I welcome queries from students interested in researching any period and medium in the art history of China and Inner Asia, with or without a prior MA degree. You may learn more about the conceptual framework of the graduate program by consulting the department’s Constellations page.