Kristen Carter, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Art History
My teaching situates art within wider social, cultural, and political histories. My goal is to get at what certain moments looked or felt like while holding view of their resonance now. Art History should not only cultivate empathy and curiosity, it should also challenge students to approach problems and questions from multiple directions and in ways that are honest about the messiness of the world we live in.
Biography
Kristen Carter holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of British Columbia and a BA in Art History from DePaul University. Her research concerns modes of viewership, participation, subject formation, and institutional critique with an emphasis on post-1968 artistic praxis and pedagogy. She has presented and published on a range of topics, including performance, body art, and dance, histories of art and pedagogy in the early 1970s in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, and the changing relationship between art and politics circa 1968. She is currently working on two research projects. The first examines histories of experimental art education in California in the early 1970s. The second studies the violence of body art in the 1960s and 1970s alongside historical notions of toxic masculinity. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the University of British Columbia and the Getty Research Institute. Before joining Florida Southern as an Assistant Professor, she taught Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, B.C. She currently serves on the College Art Association’s Education Committee.
Education
- Ph.D., Art History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
- B.A., Art History, DePaul University, Chicago, IL.