Frances Cathryn

Frances Cathryn studies the ways American culture shapes a common understanding of the past. Through her writing and research, Frances contributes to debates in art history concerning place-based memory, the ethics of representation, and the role of material culture in mediating unresolved pasts within the present. Across her work, Frances emphasizes collaborative and public-facing methodologies that reconsider how historical narratives are constructed and circulated in U.S. art and cultural discourse. Prior to Columbia, Frances earned a master’s degree in modern and contemporary literature from the University of Virginia and completed her undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aperture, Hyperallergic, Art Papers, the Brooklyn Rail, and Social Text journal, among other outlets. Frances was a finalist for the Hyperallergic Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators and the Session for Research Residency at the Luminary in St. Louis. She has held internship positions in the publications department at the Museum of Modern Art and her work has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation. In addition to her academic research, Frances sits on the board of her public library where she lives in Kingston, New York.