Wesleyan portrait of Katherine M. Kuenzli

Katherine M. Kuenzli

Professor of Art History

Boger Hall, 307
860-685-3682

Chair, Art and Art History

Professor, German Studies

kkuenzli@wesleyan.edu

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BA Yale University
MA University of California, Berkeley
PHD University of California, Berkeley

Katherine M. Kuenzli

Katherine Kuenzli's research and teaching focuses on European and American modernisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Topics of special interest include the interrelationships between modern painting, architecture, and design; formulations of international and cosmopolitan cultures; and progressive art education. 

Her publications spanning French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and the Bauhaus include two monographs, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin de Siècle (Routledge, 2010) and Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale University Press, 2019), which was awarded a Furthermore Grant in Publishing. A third book, Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889-1914 (Getty Research Institute, 2022), undertaken with translator Elizabeth Tucker, represents the first scholarly edition of van de Velde's influential writings on art and design that paved the way for the Bauhaus, which opened in school buildings he designed in Weimar, Germany. Her most recent book, A Towering Memorial: Race and Power in the Belgian Friendship Building, from the World's Fair to Virginia Union University (forthcoming from University of Virginia Press), co-authored with Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Bryan Clark Green, ties together in unexpected ways the history of modern European architecture and design, colonial exploitation, and African American achievement. Kuenzli is currently working on a study of Anni Albers's contributions to twentieth-century art, from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, portions of which she will present as an invited guest professor at the École des Hautes Études Pratiques in Paris in 2025.

Essays and articles by Kuenzli have appeared in journals, including The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art History, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide; numerous edited volumes; and in exhibition catalogues for the Los Angeles County Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.

Her work has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Canadian Center for Architecture, Chateaubriand, DAAD, Dedalus, Fulbright, Furthermore, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Getty Library, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Academic Affiliations

Office Hours

Wednesdays 3-4:30pm

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Courses

Spring 2024
ARHA 240 - 01
The Birth of Modern Art

Fall 2024
ARHA 110 - 01
Introduction to Western Art II