Michael "Mac" Mackenzie

Michael “Mac” Mackenzie is professor of art history at Grinnell College. Prior to his arrival at Grinnell, he taught for 18 years in the Department of Art and Art History at DePauw University in Indiana, and for three years at Wabash College in Indiana. Mackenzie’s special area of research is German modernism between the two World Wars, and he has also published on Postwar art and architecture in the divided Germany. His teaching has covered European modernism more broadly, including the history of modernist architecture, contemporary art and globalization, and the art of India. He is particularly concerned with correcting the lack of representation of people of color in the teaching of the Western canon. At Grinnell, Mackenzie is teaching courses on the art of India, art and literature in Paris in the 19th century, and contemporary art.

In 2019 Mackenzie published a book on the German painter Otto Dix during the 1920s and 1930s, specifically on his representation of his experiences in the trenches of the First World War. Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie, and Remembrance (published by Peter Lang in 2019) argues that Dix used grotesque humor in his representations of his traumatic war experiences, not so much to protest the war and militarism, as is typically argued, but rather to establish a solidarity and group identity with other veterans, and especially with those who identified as Social Democrats. Mackenzie has also published essays on Leni Riefenstahl’s film of  the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and on painting and architecture in East Berlin in the early 1960s.