Emily Leon is a Multidisciplinary Art Historian, Digital Humanist, & Drummer based in western Massachusetts. She is the Digital Projects & Metadata Specialist at the Visual Resources Center in Williams College Art Department and Digital Humanist with The Posen Library. She holds an MA in Digital Art History from Duke University and a BA in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), the Digital Art History Society (DAHS), and the Visual Resources Association (VRA).
As an art historian, her research interests are modernism and the esoteric interests of late-19th and early-20th century Western artists, with a particular concentration on abstraction and the links between art, science, and religion. Since 2017, much of her scholarship has focused on the social, spiritual, and theoretical implications of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s work. Most recently, she presented “Past-Future, Present-Future, Future-Future: Hilma af Klint in Three Temporal Dimensions” for the Modernist Futures conference, hosted by Modernist Studies in Asia (2023).
She is the founder of the transdisciplinary Working Group In the Eggshell, a five-part lecture series that seeks to redress modern art by turning to how the sciences, religious beliefs, and occult traditions provide a better articulation of modern art.
She also writes and publishes on sound and listening. Her essay “All the Things Perceptible Within & In-Between: The Fifth Ear & New Styles of Contact” was recently published in volume 2 of the row of trees online journal.
Research profile: intellectual and social histories, critical historiography and methodology, museum and canon studies, symbology, digital humanities