Faculty

Allison Young

Associate Professor

During the 2025-2026 academic year, Allison Young is on research leave as a Patricia and Phillip Frost Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Allison Young is associate professor of contemporary art history at LSU, and an affiliate faculty member in the department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) at LSU. She received her B.A. (2009) in Art History and Anthropology from Brandeis University, and her M.A. (2012) and Ph.D. (2017) from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Young’s scholarship explores the connections of global artistic practices to social justice movements, with particular focus on African and African Diaspora artists and art histories. She is currently working on two book projects: a monograph on the South African-born, UK-based artist Gavin Jantjes, forthcoming with Duke University Press, and a reflection on art, material culture, and public history in Louisiana at the intersection of climate crisis and racial injustice. Her research examines migration, environmentalism, and materiality in art and visual culture from a variety of geographic and transnational perspectives. Young’s recent projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and the New Foundation for Art History among others. She is the recipient of a 2025 LSU Alumni Association Rising Faculty Research Award and a 2022 Tenure-Track Faculty Award from the LSU chapter of Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society.

Young has published in leading scholarly journals including African Arts, Art Journal, British Art Studies, liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Her art criticism appears frequently in Art Review, Artforum, Art Africa Magazine, Apollo International, the Brooklyn Rail, Burnaway and elsewhere, and she has contributed essays to catalogues for national and international exhibitions in collaboration with venues such as the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Prospect New Orleans, Sharjah Art Foundation, and the Venice Biennale.

Before joining LSU, Young was Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow for Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she curated and published an exhibition catalogue for Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred (2018). In 2021, she joined the National Advisory Panel for the exhibition “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, which commemorated the life and legacy of Breonna Taylor.

Young is currently Vice President of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians and Contributing Editor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art for Smarthistory.

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