Abigail Susik

Abigail Susik is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at Willamette. 

She is Joint Editor of Bloomsbury’s Transnational Surrealism Series and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021). She is the editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-1967(Eberhardt, 2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries(Manchester UP, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State UP, 2022). Two books were published in 2025: her coedited anthology, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture 1965-2008, by Franklin Rosemont (PM Press); and her volume Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920-Present(Bloomsbury). She is a contributing editor to Volume III of the Special Edition of Enquiry onMagic Artby André Breton, (with Robert Ansell, Tessel Bauduin) (Fulgur Press, 2025). In 2026, her edited volume Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism After 1945 will be published by De Gruyter Brill. Another volume, Ultraleftist Aesthetics: Direct Action Art and the Tactical Imagination Since the 1960s(edited with David Murrieta Flores), is also forthcoming in 2026-2027 from Manchester University Press. In 2026, Common Notions Press will publish her bookIn Search of the Unified Field: Conversations with Ben Morea, and her next monograph, devoted to surrealism and the rise of Critical whiteness studies in the USA, is forthcoming in 2027-2028 from Verso Books.

Susik is a founding Board Member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and was elected as the Society's Vice President in fall 2025. She is also a lead curator of the recent retrospective exhibition "Alan Glass: Sorprendente Hallazgo," at the Museo del Palacio des Bellas Artes in Mexico City (October 2024-February, 2025), a show which travelled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as "Worlds of Wonder: The Surrealist Journey of Alan Glass" (April-September, 2025).

Her new exhibition, "Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964-67: Teenrevolt, Surrealism, Anarchism," co-curated with Sean Lovitt and Interference Archive, is on display at Interference Archive in Brooklyn from January 15-May 15, 2026, with opening events at Interference Archive, Woodbine, and Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, January 15-17, 2026 (NYC).

With Grégory Pierrot, she is co-editor of the fall 2025 special issue of African American Review, Black Surrealisms: “Cymbals of Deeper Experience,” featuring essays by Robin D. G. Kelley, Aldon Nielsen, Terri Francis, Tiffany Barber, and Kathy Lou Schultz, with poems by Will Alexander and Bernardo Wade.

She was also the guest editor of the special double centenary issue of Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, Post-war Surrealism and Anti-Authoritarianism, volumes 4.2 (2024) and 5.1 (2025), including essays by Anne Foucault, María Clara Bernal, Steven Harris, Sean Lovitt, Michael Löwy, Michael Richardson, Raymond Spiteri, Stevphen Shukaitis, and Abigail Susik.

Dr. Susik is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. In 2024, she was the Allen G. ClowesFellow at the National Humanities Center, and in 2025, she was a Senior Core Fellowat the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Central European University. She was awarded the 2025 Senior Fulbright in Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna by the Austrian Fulbright Commission. She has also been awarded a 2025 Humboldt Research Award for 'internationally recognised researchers.' She will spend 12 months at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität, Berlin, completing her forthcoming book for Verso.