Kedra Kearis

Biography

Kedra Kearis teaches the Prints and Paintings Connoisseurship courses for the Winterthur Program. Her scholarship explores the art and visual culture of the global eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the lens of the history of collecting.

Kearis’ specialties include transnational portrait style, revival interiors, and women collectors. Her research interrogates new definitions of cosmopolitanism and the portrait within the print culture of the US in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Kearis has taught a range of object-based courses in the university and museum settings. Topics have included the history of the portrait, landscape painting in the nineteenth century, as well as global art production and the city.

Prior to pursuing a career in museums, she taught French language and literature for nearly ten years.

Kearis has received grants and fellowships in support of her research from Association of Historians of American Art, New-York Historical Society, The Preservation Society of Newport County, Temple University, and the Center for Global Literacy and Cultural Studies at Michigan.

Education

• Ph.D.  Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University (Art History)
• M.A. Eastern Michigan University (Literature)
• B.A. Oakland University (French Language and Literature, Art History)

Select Publications

• ‘Her Own Room Will Be a Picture’: Alva Vanderbilt’s Bedroom à la Pompadour at Marble House (1892) by Jules Allard et Fils, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Spring 2024)
• Review of Gustave Caillebotte, Painter and Patron of Impressionism, by Ralph Gleis, ed. Gleis, Ralph, ed. Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Volume 49. 1-2, 2020.
• Artist Catalog Essays, — Mia Culbertson, Bridget K. Rogers, Kelsie Tyson, in Intersections 2020 Tyler School of Art and Architecture, 2020

Select Exhibitions

• The Peale Painters: Global Perspectives in the Winterthur Collection (2024-2025)