MA paper (in progress): "Of Mimicry and Japonisme"
Undergrad thesis: "The Artistic 'Worth' of Haute Couture"

Awards: James Watrous/Chipstone Fellowship in Material Culture (2007-2008), Phi Beta Kappa (2005)

K received her BA from Barnard College at Columbia University in 2005 and is currently an MA student in the Department of Art History at UW-Madison. K's main interest is how discourses of imperialism, modernism, and gender are negotiated in the decorative or applied arts and her work particularly investigates the relationships between artistic and social hierarchies.  K's research focuses on the long nineteenth century and involves a range of visual culture, including art books, popular illustrations, photographs, and paintings.  Her M.A. paper, "Of Mimicry and Japonisme" seeks to integrate the study of Japonisme with scholarship on thing theory and colonial discourse by analyzing decorative arts in tandem with western representations of Japanese people in a variety of media.  This project draws on the historical importance of imperialist worldviews and the theorization of visual exhibits to explore the political consequences of subject-object relationships.