Kathleen Chapman

Kathleen Chapman is an associate professor in Art History. Chapman’s teaching and research focus primarily on Western European modernist art and visual culture, especially work made in Germany before 1945. Her research interests range from images that have tended to escape traditional art historical attention, including wildlife art and commercial poster design, to more conventional art such as German Impressionism and Expressionism. She has also cowritten articles focusing on queer literature and visual culture in the United States. Her most recent work draws on posthumanist, postcolonial, and decolonial theories to examine human-animal relationships as they are configured in works of art from the past. Her current book project examines paintings and sculptures of animals by German artists during the Wilhelmine era and the Weimar Republic in light of Germans’ reactions to environmental changes resulting from industrialization and urbanization in their immediate surroundings, and from European nations’ colonialist expansion across the globe. Her undergraduate teaching includes courses in 20 th -century art: German Expressionism, surveys of European modernism, surveys of modern and contemporary women artists. She also teaches the required Art Historical Methods class, which covers the methodological foundations of art history as a discipline, as well as recent methodological approaches that expand and critique the discipline. Graduate courses include Art, Animals, & Ecologies; Fantasies of the Modern, and Art & Design of the Machine Age. Chapman received PhDs in German Literature and Art History from University of Southern California, and a BA in Germanic Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington.