Luke Naessens is a Teaching Fellow at The Courtauld Institute, where he teaches courses on twentieth-century American art. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2024 and was the 2024/25 Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld’s Centre for the Arts of the Americas. His first book, Presence and Priorness: Postminimalism and Indigeneity, will examine a series of unlikely encounters between the U.S. avant-garde and Indigenous American activism in the 1970s. Placing Postminimalist artists referencing Indigenous forms and subjects in dialogue with Indigenous artists working in Postminimalist modes, the book argues that Postminimalist aesthetics and Indigenous politics marshalled analogous, yet rarely intersecting, temporal politics: both sought to restructure dominant understandings of past, present, and future in a moment when political, economic, and environmental crises undermined faith in the myth of linear progress. More broadly, Luke’s research engages with questions of settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and property relations in modern and contemporary art in the United States and beyond.
In 2025 Luke curated Assembly, Ireland’s pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and in May 2026 he will begin a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at The Ruskin School of Art.
Recent Publications
“Sovereignty of the Dewdrop,” Art History 48, no. 2 (April 2025): 407–410
“Mandan Dandies: Trade, Intimacy, and Ornamental Excess in a Destroyed 1832 Portrait by George Catlin,” Art History 47, no. 5 (November 2024): 884–913
Research Interests
- Modern and contemporary art
- Settler colonialism
- Global Indigeneity
- Queer histories
