Ruth L. Bohan teaches courses in American art and material culture with emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. She served for eight years as the department chairperson and for three years as Interim Associate Dean for academic affairs in the College of Fine Arts and Communication. Prior to coming to the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she was a Mellon Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis and a Research Associate at the Yale University Art Gallery. Professor Bohan holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland.
Professor Bohan is the author of Looking Into Walt Whitman: American Art 1850-1920 (Penn State University Press, 2006) and The Société Anonyme's Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America (UMI, 1982). She served as contributing editor for The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné, eds. Robert L. Herbert, Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney (Yale University Press, 1984) and has published essays in Whitman among the Bohemians, eds. Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (University of Iowa Press, 2014), The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer Gross (Yale University Press, 2006), Dada New York: New World for Old, ed. Martin Ignatius Gaughan (G. K. Hall, 2003), and The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Ezra Greenspan (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Professor Bohan is the recipient of several grants and awards, including a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities, an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, and a UM Research Board Award. She serves on the Art Museum Board at the Mercantile Library. In 2009, she received the Faculty Excellence Award from the College of Fine Arts and Communication.
