Rebecca Peabody

Rebecca Peabody is an award-winning writer, educator, and certified life coach. She holds a joint PhD in the History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University and is Head of Research Projects & Academic Outreach at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her scholarly books include the award-winning Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race (2016), as well as five edited or co-edited volumes on art and visual culture in a global context: Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (2022), Visualizing Empire: Africa, France, and the Politics of Representation (2021), Lawrence Alloway, Critic and Curator (2015), Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945 – 1980 (2011), and Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945 – 1975 (2011). She has taught at Loyola Marymount University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of Southern California, and Yale University.

Rebecca’s trade book The Unruly PhD: Doubts, Detours, Departures and Other Success Stories (2014) looks at graduate education at a moment of rapid change for both higher education and the job market – and gestures towards her commitment to mentoring and coaching graduate students and emerging professionals. She is currently at work on the follow-up to Unruly PhD (due out in early 2027), and on a work of narrative non-fiction that explores childhood formation from the perspective of mid-life.