Karen Carter, Ph.D.

About

Karen L. Carter (Ph.D., University of Chicago) teaches courses on the history of art and design including Modern Art, History of Modern Design (1750 to the present), Contemporary Art, Paris and the Visual Culture of Modernity, and Art History Methods/Historiography.

Dr. Carter’s has received grants and fellowships from the University of Chicago, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Getty Research Institute, the French-American Foundation, the Library of Congress (Kluge Fellowship), and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her research focus is modern European art and design with an emphasis on turn-of-the-century French posters and paintings. She has presented papers at academic conferences organized by the College Art Association, the Midwest Art History Society, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium among others. Her research has been published in the peer-reviewed journals Journal of Design History, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Space and Culture, Early Popular Visual Culture, and Yale French Studies.

She co-edited (with Susan Waller) Modern Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise, which was published by Ashgate Publishing in 2015 and released as a paperback by Routledge in 2017.

Recent publications:


“Les réseaux d’affichage à Paris, 1880-1905” (“Networks of Poster Displays in Paris, 1881–1905”), Le Magasin du XIXe siècle, special issue on Réseaux (Networks), n. 10 (2020). Translated by Julien Schuh.

“Confronting Racial Stereotypes in Graphic Design History.” In Design History Beyond the Canon, edited by Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Victoria Pass and Christopher Wilson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. [book chapter]

Current projects:
Posters and the Visual Culture of Modern Paris, 1880–1900 analyzes the distribution and spectatorship of posters in Paris at the advent of consumer culture. [monograph]

Art History: A Thematic Approach, Part II: Renaissance to the Present, co-written with Claudia Mesch and Samantha Kavky. Cognella Publishing, 2023. [textbook]