
Paul Staiti teaches courses in Western art, American art, history painting, and the history of cinema. He has published work on Samuel F.B. Morse, William Michael Harnett, and Winslow Homer, and has co-curated an exhibition on John Singleton Copley at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His 2018 book, Of Arms and Artists tells the story of five painters—Copley, Benjamin West, Charles WIllson Peale, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart—whose lives and careers were radically altered by the American Revolution. His new book, The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier, charts the emergence of the most famous female martyr of the American Revolution. A new project involves the mammoth picture that Copley painted on the subject of the British defeat of the Spanish at Gibraltar; the picture was made for the Corporation of London.
Areas of Expertise
American art; cultural history; film studies
Education
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
- M.A., University of Massachusetts
- B.A., University of Michigan