Anne Golomb Hoffman: Scholar, Painter

Students and colleagues in Fordham's English Department know Professor Anne Golomb Hoffman as a teacher and scholar with a wide range of interests that include psychoanalytic and feminist theory, gender studies, narratology, and modern Hebrew and Jewish literature.  Many also know that she holds a research faculty appointment in the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she chairs the Richardson Research Seminar in the History of Psychiatry.

But few at Fordham are aware that she has been been drawing and painting since childhood.  In recent years, she has developed an interest in figure drawing that she sees as parallel with her work in literary and psychoanalytic studies. In her scholarship she explores representations of the body and the resonances of embodiment in narrative structure and literary experience generally. Drawing and painting, she says, are different ways of approaching some of the same questions. “In contrast to my work on (and in) language, it’s precisely the non-verbal dimensions of drawing and painting that engage me so deeply. Quite simply, they allow for absorption in the domain of the visual.”

This year Hoffman will be displaying three oil paintings in the faculty art show of the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. The exhibition will be up at the Samuel J. Wood Gallery, 1300 York Avenue (at 69th Street) in Manhattan from March 11-June 12, 2015. Visitors can view the show during library hours: Mondays through Thursdays 8am-10pm Fridays 8am-6pm; Saturdays 10am-6pm; Sundays noon-8pm.