Kay Dian Kriz

Professor of History of Art and Architecture:
History of Art & Architecture
Phone: +1 401 863 7286
K_Kriz@Brown.EDU

Dian Kriz's research and scholarship focus on British visual culture from 1700-1850,including imagery pertaining to the British Empire. Her current work is on race, slavery, and the visual culture of the British West Indies.

Biography

Dian Kriz came to Brown in 1991. She graduated from Indiana University with a B. S. with honors in Chemistry (1966). She obtained an M. A. and Ph. D. (1991) in Art History at the University of British Columbia. She has published two books, on one English landscape painting, and one on the visual culture of the British West Indies

Interests

Much of Dian Kriz's past scholarship has focused on landscape painting and the production of national identity via the trope of the "native genius" in Britain from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth- centuries. She is now taking this exploration of social identity and British visual culture into the domain of the Black Atlantic. In her recently published book, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement, she examines various forms of visual imagery (natural history illustrations, genre paintings, graphic satire, topographical prints) that pertain to the colonial exchange of goods and people between Britain and its West Indian colonies. In preparation is an article on race, caricature and J. M. W. Turner's "Slave Ship." She is currently working on a project focused around Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica, tentatively titled "The White Witch of Rose Hall: Slavery, the Female Specter, and the Ruin, 1868-2010."

Awards

See under funded research

Affiliations

College Art Association
Historians of British Art
Association of Art Historians
American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Teaching

Professor Kriz teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century visual culture, geographically focused on Britain , Europe and America (including the Caribbean ), and also critical theories of visual culture. She has taught seminars recently on the Grand Tour, the Body and the French Revolution, and Visual Culture of the Atlantic World. She is currently directing graduate dissertations on British photographer Robert Gill and on British caricature and the French Revolution. In the Spring of 2004 she directed the Graduate Practicum, which produced a website devoted to the analysis of Ernest Hamlin Baker's The Activities of the Narragansett Planters , a New Deal mural produced for the Wakefield , RI , post office (dedicated in 1939). The url for this site is: http://www.brown.edu/Courses/HA0293/

Prof. Kriz has directed undergraduate honors thesis on various topics, including a study of images of the"Nautch Girl"in India, shop signs in modern Ghana, satiric imagery of the nursing mother in 18th century England, and Cairo's urban transformation, 1855-1875.

Funded Research

Senior Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2003-4

Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship, The Huntington Library, 2001-200

Fellowship, Yale Center for British Art, spring 2002, declined

Presidential Faculty Research Fellowship, Brown University, 1999-2000

Yale Center for British Art Fellowship, 1997

Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University, 1996-97

Huntington/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, The Huntington Library, San \Marino, CA, 1996-97

Web Links

Curriculum Vitae

Download Kay Dian Kriz's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format