Commentary: Art-Historical Questions, Geographic Concepts, and Digital Methods

Paul Jaskot received his PhD in Art History from Northwestern University. He teaches courses on architectural history, modern architecture and urban planning, and German art with a particular emphasis on National Socialist Germany. In addition to his teaching, Jaskot is also the Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (formerly, the Wired! Lab). His scholarly work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. He is the author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (2000), The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012), and The Tyranny of the Object: An Introduction to the Barbarism of Art History (forthcoming 2026). In addition, he was a founding member of the ongoing Holocaust Geography Collaborative exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze the spatial history of the Holocaust. He contributed co-authored essays to their volume, Geographies of the Holocaust (2014), the first book to address the analysis of Holocaust spaces with GIS. Currently, he is continuing his collaborative work in an NEH-funded analysis of the spaces of the Nazi ghettos of Occupied Europe as well as a solo-research project on the history of the construction industry in Germany, 1914-1945. From 2014-2016, Jaskot was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and the 2020-2021 Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.). He was also the President of the College Art Association (2008-2010) and the President of the National Committee for the History of Art (2020-2024), the US affiliate to the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA).