Participant Info

First Name
Kathleen
Last Name
Pierce
Country
United States
State
Affiliation
Smith College
Website URL
https://kathleenapierce.com/
Keywords
Art history, visual culture, art and medicine, visual and material culture of science and medicine, medical humanities, history of medicine, history of public health, modernist painting, cubism, skin and surface, gender, race, history of syphilis, nineteenth-century France, French empire.
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Smith College. I received my Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University. My research explores intersections of science, medicine, art, and visual and material culture in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century French empire, attending closely to intersections of gender, race, health, and power. My teaching and research have been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the New England Humanities Consortium, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. My writing has appeared in venues such as Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Medical History, Synapsis, and Nursing Clio. At Smith College, I teach courses on the art and visual culture of the long 19th century.

Recent Publications

Journal articles:

“New Spaces for a New Midwifery at the Lying-In Hospital of the City of New York,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 29, no. 1, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/861613

“Photograph as Skin, Skin as Wax: Indexicality and the Visualisation of Syphilis in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Medical History 64 no. 1 (2020), http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2019.79

“Scarified Skin and Simian Symptoms: Experimental Medicine and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17 no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2018.17.2.7

Edited collections:

Guest editor, with Jenevieve DeLosSantos, “Hard Lessons: Trauma, Teaching, Art History,” a critical pedagogy series for Art Journal Open, 2021-2022, https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?tag=hardlessons

Public scholarship, reviews and other writing:

“Affecting Images: A Guided Self-Reflection Document for a Trauma-Informed Art History Classroom,” Art Journal Open, 2023

“Instrumentalized Images: The Trouble with Representation, Truth, and Affective Power in Histories of American Gynecology,” Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, 2023

Review of Aro Velmet, Pasteur’s Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, its Colonies, and the World, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 2022, https://www.ncfs-journal.org/kathleen-pierce/pierce-velmet-2020

“Holding Space: A Roundtable Conversation on Trauma and Teaching in the Museum,” Art Journal Open, (co-author), 2021, https://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=15407

“Using (or Losing) the Art History Textbook: SECAC Conference Panel Review,” Art History Teaching Resources Weekly, 2019, http://arthistoryteachingresources.org/2019/12/using-or-losing-the-art-history-textbook-secac-conference-panel-review/.

“Exhibition Review: Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis, Nursing Clio, 2019, https://nursingclio.org/2019/07/10/exhibition-review-germ-city-microbes-and-the-metropolis/.

“An Interview with the Material Collective,” Rutgers Art Review, vol. 33/34, 2018, https://rar.rutgers.edu/an-interview-with-the-material-collective/.

“Are Our Genes Really Our Fate? DNA’s Visual Culture and the Construction of Genetic Truth,” Nursing Clio, 2018, https://nursingclio.org/2018/04/24/are-our-genes-really-our-fate-dnas-visual-culture-and-the-construction-of-genetic-truth/.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
French Empire
Expertise by Geography
France
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, Modern, 20th century
Expertise by Topic
Art & Architectural History, Colonialism, Family, Gender, Material Culture, Medicine, Pedagogy, Race, Science, Sexuality, Urban History, Women