Professor Silverman has received a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Getty Research Institute Scholars’ Fellowship, and Historical Studies Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  She was elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences in 2008. Professor Silverman was the Marta Weeks Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for the Humanities in 2011-2012 where she explored critical histories of postcolonial museums and the Belgian case of King Leopold’s Tervuren/Africa.

Professor Silverman's books include Selling Culture: Bloomingdale's, Diana Vreeland, and the New Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan's America (1986); Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (1989; French edition, Flammarion, 1994; Japanese edition, 1999; Berkshire History Prize 1990); and Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (2000) which was awarded the 2001 Ralph Waldo Emerson National Prize for Best Book in the Humanities, and a 2001 PEN American Center/Architectural Digest National Prize for “Outstanding Writing on the Visual Arts.”