Dr. Katherine Gregory is a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Art at Wake Forest University, specializing in American art from the colonial period to the present, African American art, art and ecology, and archive theory. Her current book project is titled The Wanderer’s Eye: Robert Duncanson, Radical Mobility, and the Black American Artist Abroad. This book argues that Robert Duncanson’s landscape paintings and transatlantic travel were acts of radical Black liberation in the nineteenth century. This project examines Duncanson’s landscape paintings as an embodiment of Black freedom, as engaged in antislavery aesthetics, and as evidence of a Black artist’s participation in the transatlantic artistic community of the nineteenth century. This is the first book to analyze Duncanson’s travel-based landscape paintings, and to argue that his self-directed movement – his “radical mobility” – was an activist practice.
Dr. Gregory was the 2022-2023 recipient of a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and, as an undergraduate, received the Stella and Rensselaer W. Prize in Art History at Princeton University. Her professional experience includes curatorial work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and testsite in Austin. She has also held internships in the archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the LLILAS Benson Latin American Collection Library. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024 and her B.A. in Art & Archaeology from Princeton University in 2013 (cum laude). Dr. Gregory has published in African Arts, CAA.Reviews, SEQUITUR, Edge Effects, and elsewhere.