Katie Hornstein
Chair, Department of Art History
Professor of Art History
My research is animated by a desire to expand the idea of art history beyond a set of great masters and masterpieces. I am dedicated to the pursuit of research questions that allow me to probe understudied histories and objects that have not previously counted as "great" or "important" in order to challenge the systems of value and judgement that have traditionally dictated what constitutes the histories of European art. I bring my interdisciplinary training in art history, cultural history, and media studies to bear on a variety of different kinds of visual objects, some illustrious, like oil paintings, some that have not weathered the test of time, like panoramas and Worlds Fair display objects, and some understood to be outside of the domain of "art," such as lion pelts and messages dispatched by carrier pigeon. In my books, articles, and book chapters, I plot an alternative history of European art that is careful not to valorize the singular achievements of individual artists apart from the contested spaces where their works were produced and circulated. My research and teaching embrace current debates in my field and in the humanities more generally involving post-humanism and the nefarious intertwined logics of empire and ecological destruction, as well as questions about the representation and uses of non-human animal bodies in modern material and visual culture.
Contact
Department(s)
Art History
Education
- B.A. University of California, Berkeley, 2001
- Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2010
Selected Publications
BOOKS:
Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in the Nineteenth Century. Yale University Press, 2024.
Picturing War in France, 1792-1856, Yale University Press, 2018.
EDITED VOLUMES:
Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, eds. Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2025).
Horace Vernet and the Thresholds of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, eds. Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein (Hanover, N.H: University Press of New England, 2017).
JOURNAL ARTICLES:
"Suspended Collectivity: Horace Vernet's The Crossing the Arcole Bridge (1826)," Art History 72:3 (June: 2014): 429-453. (Official Commendation, Malcolm Bowie Prize, French Historical Studies)
Works In Progress
"Introduction," and "War, Commemoration, Mutilation: Napoleonic War Horses after the Battle of Waterloo," in Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories, co-edited by Katie Hornstein and Daniel Harkett.
"Eat the Messenger: Carrier Pigeons and the Speed of Information in the Nineteenth Century," article on carrier pigeons, information security, and financial speculation, circa 1820-1840, part of a large book project on modern carrier pigeon visual culture.
"Stray Cats in Modern Paris," an essay for a conference and future issue of ARTS journal, edited by Laura Gefland.
Selected Works & Activities
Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant for Myth and Menagerie ($11,000), College Art Association, 2022
Professor Arthur M. Wilson and Mary Tolford Wilson Faculty Fellowship/ Senior Faculty Grant, Dartmouth College, 2020-2021
ACLS Fellowship, 2018-2019
Chercheur accueillie, Centre Alexandre Koyré, EHESS/CNRS/MNHN, Paris, France, 2018-2019
John M. Manley Huntington Award for Newly Tenured Faculty, 2018
Jacobus Family Award, 2018
Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant for Picturing War in France, 1792-1856, College Art Association, 2017
Runner-up, Malcolm Bowie Prize, French Historical Studies, "Suspended Collectivity: Horace Vernet's The Crossing of the Arcole Bridge (1826)," 2015