Wanda M. Corn

Wanda M. Corn is an American art and cultural historian.

Corn is a scholar of art and photography from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. She is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor emerita of art history at Stanford University. She held the professorship for eight years before retiring from the university in March 2017. Over her career as an art professor at Stanford she brought John D. Rockefeller's personal collection to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which included a "a body of 110 paintings described as the museums’ “single most important gift of art." She served as acting director of the Stanford Art Museum now known as the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts. Prior to her position at Stanford she held the Samuel H. Kress Professorship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art from 2006 to 2007.

Early life and education Corn attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, for two years, majoring in history from 1960 to 1962. There she met her future husband, Joe Corn. In 1962, she studied abroad in London, England, at the University of London where she enrolled in University College, the Slade School of Art and Birkbeck College. There she began her studies in art history with Nikolaus Pevsner. She said of the experience: I had grown up next door to the Congregational church where my father was the minister, so I was very comfortable in churches, in England I was surrounded by all these marvelous cathedrals, and I went with Pevsner on field trips to take measurements and to try to discover the little seams that marked the places where one work period stopped and another picked up. He was an inspiration to me, and I fell in love with things medieval and thought that would be what I would spend my life doing. After returning from London, Corn spent a year in Paris as an au pair for a small local family to learn the French necessary for her continued studies in art history. She later attended New York University for her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees.

She retired from Stanford as the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She received the Archives of American Art's Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983) The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935, University of California Press (1999) Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, University of California Press (2011) Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern (2017)