Maggie Unverzagt Goddard

Maggie Unverzagt Goddard studies aesthetics and politics through the fields of visual culture studies, public humanities, and critical theory. Her research focuses on the role of art and activism in reconfiguring sites of memorialization and using curatorial strategies to represent and navigate complex histories. Her work has been supported by the Smithsonian, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. She is the author of articles published in Women & Performance, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Fwd: Museums. She has received awards for her scholarship from the Popular Culture Association and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

Her current book project, “Framing Absence,” explores how to highlight what is absent in museums: missing materials, orphaned collections, decaying matter, stolen and returned objects, censored content, and deaccessioned art. She is also partnering with the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas to curate a new exhibition around the taxidermy mount of Comanche, a horse that survived the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass, or Little Bighorn, and developing a second book project, “Reinterpreting the Horse.”

At Virginia Commonwealth University, she co-directed the Public Humanities Lab and worked on the East Marshall Street Well Project, a community-led process for reconciliation and reparations to confront institutional failures and medical racism through oral histories, policy changes, curricular innovations, and the construction of a new memorial. She has curated exhibitions at The Valentine, Cleveland Print Room, and John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage. She previously worked at the National Museum of American History, moCa Cleveland, David Winton Bell Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Thomas A. Edison High School/John C. Fareira Skills Center.