Ann Bermingham

The cover of Sensation and sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's cottage door, 2005.

Ann Cathleen Bermingham (born May 1948) is professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a specialist in 18th and 19th-century European art, and particularly British art.

Early life and education

Ann Bermingham was born May 1948. She received her BA from Manhattanville College, her MA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her PhD from Harvard University for a thesis titled, The ideology of landscape: Gainsborough, Constable and the English rustic tradition, that was accepted in 1982. She is a member of Phi Kappa Phi.

Career

Bermingham taught at University of California Irvine, UCLA, University of California Riverside and University of California Santa Cruz before joining University of California Santa Barbara in 1993 where she is currently professor emeritus of art history.

Bermingham's first book was Landscape and ideology: The English rustic tradition, 1740-1860 (1987) which was based on her PhD dissertation. The consumption of culture, 1600-1800: Image, object, text (1995) was based on the papers from a workshop that Bermingham ran with John Brewer at UCLA on the consumption of culture in the early modern period. Her Learning to draw examined the history of drawing in Britain from the Renaissance to the invention of photography and won the best book award from the Historians of British Art and was named as one of the outstanding academic titles for the year by Choice. Her most recent book is Sensation and sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's cottage door (2005) which examined the rise of the idea of sensibility in Britain in the 18th century and Thomas Gainsborough's paintings of cottage doors.

Selected publications

• Landscape and ideology: The English rustic tradition, 1740-1860. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1986. ISBN 0520052870
• The consumption of culture, 1600-1800: Image, object, text. Routledge, London, 1995. (Edited with John Brewer) ISBN 0415121353
• Learning to draw: Studies in the cultural history of a polite and useful art. 2000. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000. ISBN 978-0300080391
• Sensation and sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's cottage door. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005. (Editor) ISBN 978-0300110029