John Paul Ricco
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Room:CCT 3057
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Office Hours:Wednesdays 10am - 11am
John Paul Ricco is an art historian and queer theorist whose interdisciplinary research, teaching, and writing, draws connections between late twentieth-century and contemporary art and architecture; continental philosophy; and issues of gender and sexuality, bodies and pleasures, pornography and eroticism. He is widely recognized for his engagement with the works of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and critic Leo Bersani.
Professor Ricco is a Full Professor with primary faculty appointments in: Department of Visual Studies (UTM); Graduate Department of Art History (UTSG); and the Centre for Comparative Literature (UTSG). He was Director of Graduate Studies, Art History (2016-2028), and Associate Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature (2019-2022). He is also an affiliated graduate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion; the Cinema Studies Institute; the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies; and the Centre for the Study of the United States (all at the University of Toronto).
Courses Taught
Undergraduate – Department of Visual Studies
FAH 289 Art since 1945
VCC 304 Visual Culture & the Politics of Identity
VCC 407 Architectures of Vision
VCC 409 Capital, Spectacle, War
VCC490 The Collective Afterlife of Things
VST 101 Introduction to Visual Studies
VIC 304 Praxis and Performance (Literary and Critical Theory Program, Victoria University)
Graduate – Centre for Comparative Literature
COL 5109 Jean-Luc Nancy: Retreating the Aesthetic
COL 5100 Late Barthes: Photography, Neutral, Mourning
COL 5127 Queer Ethics and Aesthetics of Existence
COL 5142 Women and Sex and Talk
Academic Biography
PhD, Department of Art History, University of Chicago
MA, Department of Art History, University of Chicago
BA, Department of Fine Arts (Art History) New York University
As a young scholar in the early-1990s, Ricco contributed to the formation of three newly emerging fields of study: Gay and Lesbian Art History, Visual Culture, and Queer Theory. He was a contributor to the first anthology of essays in gay and lesbian art history (edited by Whitney Davis, 1994); he worked closely with W.J.T. Mitchell at the University of Chicago as Mitchell was outlining some of the founding methods of visual culture studies; and with his doctoral dissertation, Fag-o-sites: geopolitics of queer everyday life, Ricco was one of the first scholars to bring questions of space, geography and architecture to bear upon the discourses of queer theory and the politics of AIDS.
Ricco taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Texas Tech University, Cornell University, and University of Nevada, Las Vegas, prior to joining the University of Toronto in 2006.
In 1999-2000 he was a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University; and in 2001 was a participant in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. In 2003 he received an Outstanding Faculty Award from the Omicron Delta Kappa and Mortar Board Academic Society, Texas Tech University. From 2006-2012, he was Director of the undergraduate specialist program in Visual Culture and Communication in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga.
Professor Ricco was a 2015-16 Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute (University of Toronto), where he pursued a research project on “The Collective Afterlife of Things.” From 2015-2019, he held a SSHRC Insight Grant in support of his research project, “The Risks and Pleasures of Bodily Abandonment and Freedom.”
Publications
Forthcoming: Queer Finitude (Punctum, 2026). Drawing inspiration from iconic moments in contemporary art, film, photography, and literature, Ricco examines the lives of anonymous passersby and solitary strangers, elaborating a non-figural aesthetics and ethics. From Chiron in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight to the unnamed Palestinian woman in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, and from an anonymous portrait by Shaan Syed to the reclusive silhouettes in Dean Sameshima’s photographs, Ricco illustrates the delicate balance between intimacy and solitude. Through philosophical close readings, meditations on the moment’s temporality, and a novel deployment of the concept of “the time that remains,” Ricco effectively challenges and transcends the dominant theoretical frameworks of optimism and pessimism that currently define queer theory. Queer Finitude is the third and final volume in the trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside.” https://punctumbooks.com/titles/queer-finitude/
With his first monograph, The Logic of the Lure (University of Chicago Press, 2003), Ricco combined a close reading of Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy of the Outside with discussions of contemporary queer art and the anonymity, imperceptibility, itinerancy and illicitness of cruising, in order to articulate an ethics and aesthetics of social-sexual promiscuity. Recipient of an award from the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA) for one of the top 50 best book designs of 2003, The Logic of the Lure also holds the distinction of being the first published monograph in queer art history. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3620570.html
Ricco’s second monograph, The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2014), offers an extended theoretical mediation on the space of separation that is intimately shared and sustained in aesthetic and ethical social relations to everyday places and things. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo17577653.html
Current Book Project
Extinction Aesthetics. A theoretical meditation on the collective afterlife of things, and Leo Bersani’s ecological ethics.
Edited Journal Issues & Essays on Artists and Architects
Ricco is the co-editor of two recent journal issues dedicated to the work of Leo Bersani. “Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani” (with Jacques Khalip), differences, volume 34, number 1, May 2023; and “Afterlives of the Antisocial” (with Austin Svedjan), Postmodern Culture (2024).
Ricco is also the co-editor of two journal issues dedicated to the work of French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy. “Jean-Luc Nancy: Politics, Poetics, and Erotics of Exscription” (with Stefanie Heine and Philippe P. Haensler), Parallax (2020) and “Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy” (with Louis Kaplan), Journal of Visual Culture (2010).
From 2003-07 Ricco was a member of the Editorial Board of Art Journal, where from 2004-06, he served as Board Chair.
Links
Web Site: johnpaulricco.com
For further information on Prof. Ricco’s research, including downloadable copies of some of his publications go to: Academia.edu Profile
