Kathleen Pierce

Assistant Professor of Art

Contact

Hillyer Hall 314

Biography

Kathleen Pierce is an art historian who studies intersections of visual culture, science, and medicine in the 19th- and 20th-century French empire.

Pierce is at work on her first book, tentatively titled Dissecting Vision: Surface, Skin, and Pathology in and around Cubism. The project examines a broad range of objects—from dermatological illustrations and wax-cast models, to public health posters and Cubist painting and collage—to elucidate relationships between pathological skin and the surface of modern art. The project reveals shared modes of conceptualizing and visualizing the surface across the spheres of medicine, public health and artistic production. It also illuminates historically specific modes of understanding the rise of the modernist surface in the early 20th century. This research has been supported by the ACLS, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University.

Pierce has previously published scholarship probing the nexus of art, visuality, representation, science, health, and medicine in venues like Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Medical History, and Buildings & Landscapes. This scholarship has been recognized with prizes by the Society for French Historical Studies, the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, and the journal Medical History. She also has published a number of public-facing articles, including op-eds in venues like Synapsis and The Bulletin of the Medical Humanities, the latter of which is aimed at medical professionals.

In addition, Pierce is committed to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history. She previously co-guest edited a series on trauma-informed pedagogy and art education for Art Journal Open. Currently, she is at work on a co-edited volume dedicated to art history pedagogy: Equity-Enhancing Strategies for the Art History Classroom. She is also the incoming co-Editor-in-Chief of Art History Pedagogy & Practice, a journal dedicated to the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history.

At Smith College, Pierce teaches courses on the art and visual culture of the long 19th century. Her pedagogy emphasizes how images construct 19th-century understandings of race, gender, health and power, and she encourages students to recognize how this thinking continues to permeate contemporary culture. She has offered courses on topics including: art and medicine; the imbrication of the decorative arts and imperialism in North America and western Europe; race and gender in the history of photography; and the intersection of art history and animal studies.

Selected Publications

Articles

“'Typical Cases': Representation, Racializing Medicine, and the Politics of the Case Study in the Moulages Collections of the Hôpital Saint-Louis," Histoire, Médecine et Santé [History, Medicine and Health] 27, no. 1 (forthcoming, 2025)

“New Spaces for a New Midwifery at the Lying-In Hospital of the City of New York,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 29, no. 1 (2022)

“Photograph as Skin, Skin as Wax: Indexicality and the Visualisation of Syphilis in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Medical History 64, no. 1 (2020): 116-141.

“Scarified Skin and Simian Symptoms: Experimental Medicine and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 17, no. 2 (2018).

Public Scholarship

“Looking, Seeing, and Knowing: Thinking through Visuality in Medical Education and Practice with Louis-Ernest Barrias’s Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science,” Boletín de Humanidades Médicas [Bulletin of the Medical Humanities], 4, no. 20 (forthcoming December 2024).

"Instrumentalized Images: The Trouble with Representation, Truth, and Affective Power in Histories of American Gynecology," Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal (2023)

“Are Our Genes Really Our Fate? DNA’s Visual Culture and the Construction of Genetic Truth,” Nursing Clio (2018).

Office Hours

On leave—By appointment only

Education

Ph.D., Rutgers University

B.A., Villanova University

Personal website

Selected Works in Smith ScholarWorks