Kathryn Brown

Biography

Kathryn is a lecturer in art history and visual culture at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. Prior to joining Loughborough in 2016, she was a Lecturer in Art History at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She is a Rhodes Scholar and has taught and held visiting fellowships at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), the University of British Columbia (Canada), Tulane University (USA), the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art (Washington DC).

Prior to becoming an art historian Kathryn was a corporate lawyer in the City of London. During her 14-year career in the City, she led teams of lawyers on large-scale mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, and IPOs (initial public offerings). She became a partner in a leading international law firm in 2006. Her legal career has provided her with an invaluable background to her recent work on the contemporary art market. It has also informed her teaching and publication in the field of law and popular culture.

From 2010–2014 she was a member of the International Committee of the College Art Association. She has served as a member of the editorial board of H-France and was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Foresight Committee in 2014. From 2010–2014, she chaired the Modern and Contemporary Art section of the Dutch Research School in Art History. She is the Series Editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic.

At Loughborough she convenes a research group on Museums, Markets and Critical Heritage. This group is a forum for the exchange of ideas about art markets, exhibition histories, museums, and public and private collecting practices. By bringing together the perspectives of academics, artists, curators, collectors, and dealers, the group engages critically with the histories and futures of cultural heritage from a range of trans-national perspectives.

Education

D.Phil (University of Oxford); PhD (University of London)

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Kathryn's research interests' range from 19th- and 20th-century French painting and literature to artists’ books, modernism, contemporary art, the art market, and digital art history. She is a specialist in the works of Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas. Her books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Routledge 2012), Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and Henri Matisse: A Critical Life (Reaktion, 2021). In addition to her journal articles, book chapters, and catalogue essays, she has edited numerous essay collections including: The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2013), Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (I.B. Tauris, 2014), Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2017) and Digital Humanities and Art History (Routledge, 2020).

Her current research focuses on intersections between art markets and museums; the histories and legacies of New York Dada; and the print culture of the Harlem Renaissance. She is also developing her research on the work of Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse.

In recent years, her research has been funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Independent Social Research Foundation, The Shpilman Center for Photography, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, French Studies, and the Association for Art History. She has held visiting fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, Tulane University, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art in Washington DC.

Websites

• Kathryn Brown

Books