Barbara Jaffee joined the faculty of the School of Art at Northern Illinois University in 1999. She teaches courses in modern and contemporary European and American art, museology, and art theory and criticism. Before arriving at NIU, she taught studio art and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Professor Jaffee’s research interests focus on the critical discourse and institutional framework within which modern art developed, particularly in the United States. Her work includes systemic analysis of art worlds, the dynamic of self-promotion within artists’ groups, emergence of artistic canons, and the relationship between modern art and industrialism. Her book-length study, Diagrammatics: Industrialism and the Modernizing of American Art, documents the use of diagrams in art pedagogy in the United States, a topic which provides not only a framework for understanding the popularization and diffusion of modernist aesthetics, but an opportunity to investigate the origins and early (pre-1913) development of modern forms of painting.

Professor Jaffee has received fellowships from the University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Education, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Among her publications are several articles and book chapters, including "Jackson Pollock’s Industrial Expressionism” (Art Journal, Winter 2004) and “Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago” (DesignIssues, forthcoming).