Catriona MacLeod

Catriona MacLeod is Vice Provost for the Arts and the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor at the University of Chicago, affiliated with the College and the Department of Germanic Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1992) and an M.A. from the University of Glasgow (1986), teaching at UChicago since 2019.

Her research spans German literature and culture of the 18th–19th centuries, integrating History of Art, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Literature and Media. She focuses on intermediality, material culture, and hybrid forms in German Classicism and Romanticism, with expertise in ekphrasis, narrative theory, and objects in literature and film.

Recent publications include Water and Sea in Word and Image / L’Eau et la mer dans les textes et les images (2023, co-edited) and Stifter’s Natives and Wandering Exotica (2024). Her book Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (2014) won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, and she received an ACLS Fellowship (2018) for her work on Romanticism.

Scientific awards include:

• Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize (2014)
• ACLS Fellowship (2018)

She has collaborated with art historians on projects like the 2019 conference Romantic Prints on the Move and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Word & Image. She previously held leadership roles in the International Association of Word and Image Studies and the Goethe Society of North America (2019–2022).