Dr. Matthew Fox-Amato is a nationally and internationally recognized historian of the United States and scholar of art and visual culture.

He is the author of Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.  Exposing Slavery was the runner-up for the Shapiro Book Prize of The Huntington Library, a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award.  The book was excerpted in Lapham’s Quarterly, reviewed positively by public outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and Boston Review as well as by academic journals published on three continents, and was named one of The Advocate’s “Must-Read Books on Race and Hate.” 

Dr. Fox-Amato is Associate Professor of History at the University of Idaho.  He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in History, with a certificate in Visual Studies, at the University of Southern California, after which he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.