Kathryn Brown

I hold a D.Phil in French (University of Oxford) and a PhD in Art History (University of London). Prior to joining Loughborough University in 2016, I was a Lecturer in Art History at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. I am a Rhodes Scholar and have taught and held visiting fellowships at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), the University of British Columbia (Canada), Tulane University (USA), and the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University.

My books include Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Ashgate, 2012/2016), Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Matisse: A Critical Life (Reaktion, forthcoming 2021) and (as editor and contributor) The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Ashgate, 2013), Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (I.B. Tauris, 2014/2016), Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2017), Digital Humanities and Art History (Routledge, 2020).

My articles have appeared in Print Quarterly, French Studies, The Journal for Art Market Studies, The History of Photography, Art & The Public Sphere, Life Writing, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Forum for Modern Language Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Memory Studies, n.paradoxa, American Art and in various edited collections and exhibition catalogues.

Part of my current research concerns trends in collecting and the market for contemporary art. I am the series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic. My research has recently been funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Independent Social Research Foundation, French Studies, and the Association for Art History. I have been awarded a Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art, Washington DC, for Winter 2021.

Prior to becoming an art historian I was a corporate lawyer in the City of London. During my fourteen-year career in the City, I led teams of lawyers on large-scale mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, and IPOs (initial public offerings). I became a partner in a leading international law firm in 2006.