Catherine Dossin

Catherine Dossin is Associate Professor of Art History at Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts, with additional appointments in Comparative Literature and affiliations to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Latin American Studies. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Artl@s Bulletin and is a founding member of the Artl@s digital humanities consortium that maps global artistic circulations.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Art History, The University of Texas at Austin
• M.A. in Art History, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne

Research Interests: Dossin’s work interrogates the geopolitical scaffolding of twentieth-century Western art. Her first monograph, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s (Routledge 2015), reframes U.S. artistic ascendancy as a contingent outcome of Cold-War cultural diplomacy, market infrastructures, and transatlantic critical discourse rather than an inevitable teleology. Co-edited volumes Circulations in the Global History of Art (2015) and France and the Visual Arts since 1945 (2018) propose methodological alternatives to nationalist narratives by foregrounding itineraries, encounters, and spatial data. An emerging project, French Images of America in the Age of Revolutions, 1760s–1820s, extends these concerns into the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, analyzing how French visual culture manufactured and circulated the ideological myth of America during the Revolutionary era.

Recent Publications Trend: Since 2015 Dossin has published more than thirty peer-reviewed articles that collectively move from post-1945 geopolitics toward longer durée transatlantic exchanges. Recurrent themes include the cultural Cold War, digital spatial history, gendered exhibition networks, and the visual construction of national identities. Her 2024 output revisits both methodological foundations of stylistic analysis and micro-historical case studies such as Jackson Pollock’s French reception, signaling an integrative approach that couples close visual reading with macro-scale mapping.

Current Projects & Grants: She is principal investigator of the Artl@s platform, supported by Purdue Libraries, the Mellon Foundation, and the French Embassy, which crowd-sources geospatial data on artists, exhibitions, and markets. A forthcoming monograph on French allegories of America is under advance contract with a university press.

Teaching & Mentoring: At Purdue she offers undergraduate and graduate courses on modern and contemporary Western art, global art history, Latin American visual culture, and women artists. Graduate supervision is active; specific advisee names are not listed in the provided materials.