Current Students

Katelyn DelGallo Crawford

B.A., History, Columbia University, 2006
M.A, Art and Architectural History, University of Virginia, 2010
PhD Candidate

Kate is a fifth-year doctoral candidate studying American art and architecture with Professor Maurie D. McInnis. She is particularly interested in American and British art, portraiture, and material culture studies. Her dissertation, "Transient Painters, Traveling Canvases: Portraiture and mobility in the British Atlantic, 1750 – 1780," examines the paintings of portraitists working within the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, demonstrating the impact of mobility on artistic practice and portraiture on identity construction. Considering a network of about ten portraitists, the canvases they produce, and the travel of both individuals and images throughout the British Atlantic in the mid eighteenth century, this study identifies a shift in the construction of artistic communities as artists take to sea. By considering portraits and conversation pieces across the Atlantic rim, the project reveals visual convergences (in empire-wide visual conventions) and divergences (between local idioms in various port cities) that illustrate the development of regional identities within imperial conventions.

In addition to her dissertation research, Kate has recently worked as a curatorial intern, aiding in the early stages of planning for a 2015 exhibition of colonial American portraits at the New-York Historical Society. She has served as a teaching assistant for courses in the department including American Art II, Arts & Cultures of the Slave South, and British Art. She also continues work she began in her master's thesis on an eighteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina portraitist Jeremiah Theus.

Her research has recently been supported by fellowships from Winterthur Museum, Library & Garden, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She was also the recipient of a University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Presidential Fellowship from 2008 – 2012. During the 2012 – 2013 academic year, Kate is a Terra Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.