Director

Elizabeth Otto

Director, Humanities Institute
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies, Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies
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Elizabeth Otto (Libby) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies and previously served as Executive Director of UB’s Humanities Institute (HI). At HI, she has focused particularly on supporting faculty and graduate research and publications, and she has sought to expand HI’s audience through public-humanities collaborations, particularly the annual Buffalo Humanities Festival, which she cofounded in 2014.

Libby’s research focuses on early twentieth-century visual and media culture. She is the author of numerous scholarly essays and the co-author of Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2019) and of the exhibition catalogue Bauhausmädels/Bauhaus Gals (Erfurt, 2019). She has co-edited four books: Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School (Bloomsbury, 2019), Art and Resistance in Germany (Bloomsbury, 2019), Passages of Exile (Edition Text + Kritik, 2017), and The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (University of Michigan Press, 2011). In 2005, she authored Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Jovis Verlag, 2006) and curated the exhibition of the same name for the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the International Center of Photography in New York.