C. Oliver O’Donnell is a historian of modern art and intellectual history with a particular focus on US-American traditions of modernity. He has taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and at St. John’s University in New York.  At Trinity, he teaches a seminar on Impressionism and American Collecting, which is hosted by Hill-Stead Museum.

A recipient of research grants and fellowships from many institutions, he has been a Research Associate and Dissertation Supervisor at the Warburg Institute in London and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. He is the author of Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates (Penn State Univ. Press, 2019), which was awarded the 2019 Willibald Sauerländler Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, and Portraits of Empiricism: Art Histories from an Intellectual Tradition (Penn State Univ. Press, 2026).  His ongoing research, which focuses on the Ashcan School of painting, is currently being supported by the NOMIS Foundation and the University of California, Berkeley, where is a Senior Research Fellow (remote).

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