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Department ofArt and Art History

Maggie Wander

Maggie Wander

Assistant Professor

Research

Maggie researches the visual and material cultures of Oceania (the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Papua New Guinea) with a particular focus on sovereignty, decolonization, critical heritage, and contemporary art. Her dissertation, titled "Materializing History: Contemporary Art and the Temporalities of Climate Change in Oceania," focused on a selection of contemporary art projects that interrogate the role of colonial history in the current ecological crisis. She received her Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2024. Before joining SCU, Maggie was Senior Research Associate for Oceanic Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she worked on the major reinstallation of the permanent collection in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Maggie is the co-Executive Editor of Pacific Arts, the journal of the Pacific Arts Association, and her writing has appeared in the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, The Contemporary Pacific, Media Fields Journal, and more. She has presented her research at the College Art Association, the European Society for Oceanists, and the University of California, among others. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and UC Santa Cruz.

Courses

ARTH 11A/12A Cultures & Ideas I&II: Oceania in a Global Context
ARTH 70 Oceania: Arts and Culture
ARTH 170 Climate Change, Environmental Justice, and Contemporary Art in the Global South

Publications

“Making New Histories: Contemporary Art in Oceania and the Temporal Orientations of Climate Change.” Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies Special Issue: New Scholarship 9, no. 2 (2021): 155-178.

“Navigating the Climate Crisis: Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Creative Constellations.” Spectator 41, no. 1 (2021): 28-38.

“The Karrabing Film Collective: ‘Talking Back’ to Ethnographic Media and Mineral Extraction in Australia,” Media Fields Journal 15 (2020).