Kelly Presutti

Assistant Professor

Overview

Kelly Presutti is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, where she teaches courses in modern Western art and the environmental humanities. Research interests include nineteenth-century art and visual culture, landscape, and ecocriticism. Her first book, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France (2024), looks to four landscape typologies—forests, mountains, wetlands and coasts—as sites of negotiation and contestation between state power, local inhabitants, and the environment. A new project studies the art and object collections of the French navy, attending especially to stories of failure, weakness, and defeat to illuminate the surprising role disaster played in the formation of an imperial maritime identity. 

Prior to completing her PhD, Presutti held positions at the Getty, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, among other arts organizations. Her work has been supported by Harvard's Center for European Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, a Bourse Chateaubriand from the French Embassy, and fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, UK).   

Publications

Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France (Yale University Press, 2024). 

“Wood and Stone: Bernard Palissy’s Environmental Legacy,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 59 (2024), 58-72. 

“‘A Better Idea than the Best Constructed Charts’: Watercolor Views in Early British Hydrography,” Grey Room 85 (Fall 2021), 70-99.

“The Sèvres’ Service des Départements and the Anxiety of the Fragment,” Word & Image 37, no. 1 (2021), 21-31.

“Transplanting Visions: Barbizon Artists and Louisiana Landscapes,” in Katie Pfohl, ed. Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 59-83.

In the news

ARTH Courses - Spring 2025

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