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
- Kelly Presutti Published in Metropolitan Museum Journal
- How art helped to shape modern France
- Grant to enhance art history book
- Kelly Presutti Receives CAA Millard Meiss Publication Grant for Book
- Wondering what to read in 2023? A&S faculty offer ideas
- Conference explores the theme of “Repair” from multiple humanities disciplines
- Professor Presutti writes exhibition review for Apollo
- Community read launches Society for the Humanities’ ‘Repair’ theme
- Watercolor views advanced the British empire
- A fragmented France depicted on dessert plates