As we begin the semester, we're highlighting Bryn Mawr's newest faculty members. The College supports faculty excellence in both research and teaching.
Assistant Professor of History of Art C.C. McKee, The Emily Rauh Pulitzer 1955 Chair in the History of Art
Informed by ecocritical, queer, psychoanalytic, and Black Feminist theories, McKee’s research centers on colonial art and visual culture of the Atlantic World from the eighteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on African diasporic history and aesthetic production in the Caribbean. In their current monographic project, titled Cultivating Visible Order: Representations of Tropical Ecology and Race in the French Atlantic, McKee uses painting to trace the coeval developments in colonial race and environmental sciences in the francophone Atlantic World. Spanning the long nineteenth century, Cultivating Visible Order contends that, on the one hand, painting bolstered imperial authority by eliding the inhumane violence and ecological brutality of colonialism. On the other, these artworks were inadvertent repositories for parallel ecologies opening onto embodied African diasporic knowledge of the Caribbean landscape.
This project represents one facet of McKee’s broader investment in the relationship between colonialism (particularly during the eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries) and its continued effects in the present. These interests include, the art history of science in the Atlantic World, contemporary African and African diasporic art, and queer aesthetic practices. In addition to their scholarship, McKee has developed these perspectives in various pieces of art criticism; with exhibitions at the Block Museum, Iceberg Projects (Chicago, IL), and the Ghetto Biennale (Port-au-Prince, Haiti); as well as in an article recently published in Art Journal on the contemporary Dutch-Caribbean artist Deborah Jack. In 2019, McKee was awarded the Professional Development Fellowship in Art History from the College Art Association with the aim of pursuing a scholarly and curatorial practice that challenges the boundaries between the university classroom and the museum, between academic publication and exposing a broad public to Caribbean artistic traditions.
The curriculum in History of Art immerses students in the study of visual culture. Structured by a set of evolving disciplinary concerns, students learn to interpret the visual through methodologies dedicated to the historical, the material, the critical, and the theoretical. Majors are encouraged to supplement courses taken in the department with History of Art courses offered at Swarthmore and the University of Pennsylvania. Majors are also encouraged to study abroad for a semester.