# Andrew Moisey

**Source**: https://americanstudies.cornell.edu/andrew-moisey
**Parent**: https://americanstudies.cornell.edu/faculty

## Assistant Professor

### Overview

I study how pictorial models are related to philosophical systems in photographic media and art history.  My forthcoming book, *The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography* (Yale, 2026) is about how early modern artists in Europe added immediacy, takenness, and embodiment—features of everyday photography—to their pictures of everyday life before photography. My scholarship is also found in journals like *Critical Inquiry*, *The Journal of Aesthetics and Culture*, and *Qui Parle*. My photobook, *The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual* (Daylight, 2018), received mainstream and art-world acclaim during the #MeToo era, when it was a best-of-2018 photobook in *The Guardian*, *TIME*, and *The British Journal of Photography* and included in the Barbican’s landmark traveling exhibition *Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography* (2020-22).

At Cornell, I teach courses like History of Photography, The Photobook, and Film Art for Art Historians. As our department’s Director of Visual Studies, I sometimes teach Introduction to Visual Studies, a wide-ranging and popular lecture course about the history of modern seeing. When I am not teaching or writing, I am with my family, in my woodshed, or wandering around with a lob wedge.\

### Research Focus

History and theory of photography, moving image media, photographic practice, digital media, modern image culture, affect theory, philosophy of mind, value, and aesthetics

## Courses - Winter 2026

- [AMST 2000 : Introduction to Visual Studies](https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/WI26/class/AMST/2000)