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Visiting Assistant Professor

Art

Jessy Bell is a historian of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and urbanism, with expertise on the former Yugoslav and Soviet territories and nonaligned internationalism. Her work explores the cultural complexities and mediapolitics of the built environment under socialism and socialist exchange with the nations of the Global South. She is especially interested in spatial evolutions after revolution, the visibility or invisibility of construction labor, spatial contestations, rebuilding after catastrophe, and questions of solidarity. Her current book project, Infrastructures of Solidarity: Nation-Building and Worldmaking in Socialist Yugoslavia, examines how material and social infrastructures in Yugoslavia—such as highways and memorial park networks—negotiated national belonging and facilitated multiethnic, trans-generational, and nonaligned solidarities. While Yugoslavia has been marginalized in Western-centric accounts of modernity, her project rectifies this gap by reviving the specificities of anti-fascist multiculturalism and anti-colonialism that buttressed culture and politics in Yugoslavia and ruptured the Cold War bloc logic. Additional areas of interest include embodied space, international trade fairs, photography as infrastructure, the global avant-garde, and revolutionary hope and dread. 

She received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2024 and completed her BA in Art History at the University of California Berkeley in 2016. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Schiff Foundation, the Buffett Institute, the Institute for International Studies, and the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, among others. Her writing has appeared in Fabrications, Oxford Art Journal, and CAA.reviews. 

Areas of Specialization

Program Area: Global Modern and Contemporary; Architecture and Urbanism

Regional Specialization: South-Eastern Europe, Soviet Empire, Nonaligned Internationalism