Office:  LA 106

Phone:  406-657-2980

email: pvbecker@msubillings.edu

Dr. Patricia Vettel-Becker, Professor of Art, has been Chair of the Department of Art since January 2009.  She came to MSU Billings in Fall Semester 1998, after completing her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. 

Areas of Specialization:  American Art and Culture, Gender Studies, Modern and Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, and the History of Photography and Film.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Books:

Shooting from the Hip: Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 

Articles:             

“Sacagawea and Son: The Visual Construction of America's Maternal Feminine.” American Studies 50: 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2009): 5-30. 

“Clarence Holbrook Carter’s War Bride and the Machine/Woman Fantasy.” Genders 37 (2003): 1-16. http://www.genders.org/g37/g37_becker.html 

“Destruction and Delight: World War II Combat Photography and the Aesthetic Inscription of Masculine Identity.” Men and Masculinities 5:1 (July 2002): 80-102. 

“Bad Boys: Bruce Davidson’s Gang Photographs and Outlaw Masculinity.” Art Journal 56:2 (Summer 1997): 69-74.  

“Felix the Cat as Modern Trickster.” American Art 10:1 (Spring 1996): 65-87.    

Exhibition Catalogues:     

Dust to Dust: The Art of Tracy Linder. Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana, 2000. 

Catalogue essay reprinted in Drumlummon Views 1 (Spring/Summer 2006) http://www.drumlummon.org/html/toc.html

Book Reviews: 

Reviews of Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation by Blake Stimson, and American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century by Louis Kaplan. caa.reviews (January 15, 2008).

Review of Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing by Katherine Henninger. Journal of Southern History 74:4 (November 2008): 1032-1033.

SELECT HONORS AND AWARDS:

MSU Billings Faculty Achievement Award, 2005

Winston and Helen Cox Fellowship for Faculty Excellence in Arts  and Sciences, MSU Billings, 2002

Illumina Teacher Award, The Artist’s Call for Justice, 2002

Ansel Adams Research Fellow, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1997

CURRENT RESEARCH:

Currently working on a book about visual culture, femininity and the 1960s in the U.S.  Chapters completed include “Where No Woman Has Gone Before: Fashion Photography and the Race for Space” and "Star Trek: Space and the Single Girl."