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Melissa Geisler Trafton
The South Carolina School of the Arts
The South Carolina School of the Arts
Assistant Professor, Art History
mtrafton@andersonuniversity.edu
Springdale
Academic Background
Melissa Geisler Trafton is an art historian of modern and contemporary art. Her interests include the history of collecting, twentieth-century prints, nineteenth-century printed ephemera and visual culture, and artist collectives. She has held curatorial positions in many museums, and served as a consulting researcher for several digital projects, including the complete catalog of artworks by artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) and a website dedicated to the screenprints produced by incarcerated Japanese Americans at Amache (1943-1945).
BA in History & Literature and Fine Arts, Harvard University
MA in Art History, University of California, Berkeley
PhD in Art History, University of California, Berkeley
Fast Facts
My classes emphasize the value of looking closely, of thinking about the cultures of the past, and of visual and historical research. They are definitely a “romp through history.”
The mission of Anderson and its close-knit campus community provide a great sense of collegiality. I appreciate that both students and faculty are focused on service and on making the world a better place.
Art history provides skills in close looking and critical thinking – skills that are increasingly important in our visual world! In addition, learning about the visual culture of the past teaches us about the way in which people of all times and places have addressed universal human emotions and questions.
Board member of the Association of Print Scholars (2025-present)
James E. Laramy Fellowship in American Visual Culture, at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, 2024
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, Library Company of Philadelphia, 2023
Association of Print Scholars Collaboration Grant awarded to the Amache Alliance for the construction of the Amache Silk Screen Shop website, 2019
Wyeth Foundation for American Art Grant written and awarded for the Fitz Henry Lane Online Project (www.fitzhenrylaneonline.org), 2016
My students ask amazingly thoughtful and interesting questions, which we are able to explore in the small classes that characterize AU.
Print history, Ephemera studies, Collecting and art-market history, 19th and 20th century American art
Collective Agency and Resistance during Japanese American Incarceration: The Amache Silk Screen Shop Palgrave MacMillan, 2025.
“Images of Barbed Wire and Guard Towers: Visual Resistance to Japanese American Incarceration at Amache (1943-1945),” in America’s Carceral Landscape, ed. Keri Watson, University of Arkansas Press (forthcoming).
“Under the White Umbrella: Samuel L. Gerry and the Public Role of the Artist in the Nineteenth-Century Art Market,” Historical New Hampshire. (2021) 74.1: 80-119.
On View in Cornish: American Art at the Picture Gallery, 1948-2019, exhibition and catalog, Saint-Gaudens Memorial, 2019. https://saint-gaudens.org/exhibition/1948-2019-retrospective/
Georgia Barnhill and Melissa Geisler Trafton, Drawn from Nature and on Stone: the Lithographs of Fitz Henry Lane. Gloucester, MA: Cape Ann Museum, 2017.
“‘It’s a Joint Venture’: John Frederick Kensett’s Images for Lotus-Eating,” American Art. (2011) 25.2: 104-119.