MARCIA BRENNAN is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. Her research engages modern and contemporary art history; mysticism and comparative religion; and the medical humanities. She is the author of Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (MIT Press, 2004); Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2001, 2002); and she is the lead author of the Menil Museum's exhibition catalogue, A Modern Patronage: De Menil Gifts to American and European Museums (Yale 2007); and the catalogue accompanying the retrospective for the contemporary artist Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me (MIT Press, forthcoming 2008). She is currently finishing a book examining the ways in which art museums hold the potential to function as numinous sites of aesthetic contemplation and mystical experience. Entitled Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (MIT Press, forthcoming 2008), this book will focus on the instrumental capacity of aesthetics to express transformational and transcendent states of being, both historically and within our own secular postmodern culture. She is the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and Rice’s Humanities Research Center.