Kaja Silverman (born September 16, 1947)[1] is an American art historian and critical theorist. She is currently the Katherine and Keith L. Sachs Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of California Santa Barbara and a Ph.D. in English from Brown University.[2] Thereafter, she taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and for many years was the Class of 1940 Professor in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship[3] in 2008, and is currently the holder of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.[4]
Her writing and teaching at the moment are focused primarily on photography, contemporary art, and painting.[5] She is currently writing the second volume, A Three-Personed Picture: or the History of Photography Part 2, of a three part revisionary history and theory of photography. The first volume, Miracle of Analogy, was published in 2015.
Silverman has written extensively on a wide range of figures including artists: Jean-Luc Godard, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Proust, Ranier Maria Rilke, Terrence Malick, James Coleman, Jeff Wall, Chantal Akerman, John Dugdale (photographer), and thinkers: Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Silverman co-wrote Speaking About Godard with the German artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki, her life partner from 1992–1999.
George Baker of UCLA says of Flesh of My Flesh: "This is an extraordinary book: Silverman's magnum opus. In some respects it is sui generis, and yet its stakes are so high they could almost be called universal. In my opinion, this is the kind of book that one comes across only a few times in one's life. It is that important."