Kathryn Desplanque

Kathryn Desplanque is an Assistant Professor of 18th and 19th Century European Art in the Department of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a mixed race, Black and white scholar who specializes in European visual culture, particularly French and English imagery from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Her educational background includes a BFA in Printmaking from Concordia University (2008), an MA in Art History from Carleton University (2011), and a PhD from Duke University (2017). Prior to her current position, she held the Carolina Post-Doctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity at UNC Chapel Hill and the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carleton University.

Dr. Desplanque's research focuses on satirical imagery as a vehicle for criticizing the emergence of a free market for contemporary art across the Industrial Revolution. She employs Digital Humanities methodologies, building and querying relational databases to study hundreds of images, and works extensively with qualitative data analysis software like NVivo. She has served as a Research Advisory Board member to QSR International, NVivo's parent company. Her current projects include Inglorious Artists, examining satirical images targeting the Parisian art world between 1750-1850, and Papermania, charting the growing popularity of scrap sheets and scrapbooking across France, England, and North America.

Her publication record reveals a consistent focus on satirical print culture, with particular attention to how caricatures functioned within shifting artistic economies. Her work demonstrates how visual satire critiqued structural transformations in the art world across political revolutions and regime changes, often focusing on the "inglorious artist" as a social type contradicting the exceptional genius narrative.

Dr. Desplanque has received significant recognition through prestigious fellowships and serves in leadership roles including:

• Co-Chair, Board of Directors for Ottawa's Digital Arts Resource Center
• Member at Large on the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Member of the City of Durham Public Art Committee

She is an active contributor to digital humanities methodologies, having delivered workshops and talks on image analysis using NVivo at institutions including Oberlin College. Her research bridges traditional art historical methods with computational approaches to analyze large corpora of visual material.

Dr. Desplanque co-chairs the Board of Directors for Ottawa's Digital Arts Resource Center and serves on multiple committees focused on diversity and public art. Her work demonstrates strong interdisciplinary connections between art history, digital humanities, and cultural studies.