Kathryn Desplanque
Assistant Professor of 18th and 19th Century European Art
desplanq@ad.unc.edu
Hanes Art Center
BFA, Printmaking major, Concordia University, 2008
MA, Art History, Carleton University, 2011
Ph. D., Duke University, 2017
Kathryn Desplanque is a mixed race, Black and white, scholar who came to UNC after holding the Carolina Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carleton University, Ottawa, ON.
Kathryn specializes in 18th and 19th century European visual culture, particularly French and English imagery. She works with Digital Humanities methodologies, building and querying relational databases to study hundreds of images. Currently, she works with qualitative data analysis software, in particular NVivo. Kathryn has served as a Research Advisory Board member to QSR International, NVivo’s parent company. Some of her workshops on her research methodologies can be found online: A Change of View for NVivo, PhD LAB (video below), Oberlin College Talk.
Kathryn is completing her first book project on a corpus of over 500 satirical images, published between 1750 and 1850, that target the contemporary Parisian art world. Inglorious Artists examines how artists used satirical imagery as a vehicle to criticize the emergence of a free market for contemporary art across the Industrial Revolution. Her second book project, Papermania, charts the growing popularity of scrap sheets and scrapbooking across France, England, and North America during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Papermania considers the conceptual overlap between today’s image-sharing smartphone applications and scrap sheets and scrapbooking through the lens of mass customization and curatorial consumption.
Kathryn co-chairs the Board of Directors for Ottawa’s Digital Arts Resource Center. She serves as the Member at Large on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee to the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
A list of Kathryn’s publications can be found on her Academia profile.