Katherine Fein

Katherine specializes in the visual and material culture of the United States and the Atlantic world. Her research and teaching center on representations of the human body and their relationship to social and ecological change. Her work has been supported by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. At Columbia, she also earned a graduate certificate from the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and completed fellowships with the Center for Teaching and Learning. Prior to pursuing a PhD, she received a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked in the Education Department at the Brooklyn Museum.

Publications

“Picturing White Skin on Elephant Tusk,” in “Seeing the Survey Anew,” commentaries, ed. Kirsten Pai Buick, American Art 36, no. 3 (Nov. 2022): 20–23.

“White Skin, Silvered Plate: Encountering Jonathan Walker’s Branded Hand in Daguerreotype,” Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 3 (Dec. 2021): 357–377. Recipient of the Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize for Early Career Researchers.

“‘The Sense of Nearness’: Harriet Hosmer’s Clasped Hands and the Materials and Bodies of Nineteenth-Century Life Casting,” British Art Studies, no. 14 (Nov. 2019).