Jaleh Mansoor is a writer and an associate professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history with an emphasis on Post WWII European Art.  Her areas of interest, in addition to art and its histories, include Materialist Formalism and Marxist Feminism. Mansoor’s first monographic book, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published by Duke UP in 2016.  Her latest primary project, titled after Picabia’s eponymous homage to a passage in Marx’s Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, is Universal Prostitution: A Counter History of Modernism, which came out with Duke University Press in May 2025.  It traces the historical and structural entwinement of aesthetic and real (or concrete) abstraction — defined as the extraction of labor power valorized by transactional exchange on the market— over 20^th C art to offer a comprehensive account of the political economic forces that motivated modernist abstraction and the advent of post-humanism.