Profile

Ariel Kline studies 19th-century and early 20th-century art under Professor Bridget Alsdorf. Her dissertation, “Of Monsters and Mirrors: Painting and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” centers on heroism and monstrosity as fragile poles that organize and—at times—disrupt the racial, ethical, and political imaginations of British art. Her research interests include art and empire, queer theory, critical race theory, and kitsch.

Kline received an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College. She then received an M.A. from Williams College and the Clark Art Institute, where she won the Clark Graduate Prize for her M.A. qualifying paper, “Listening to His Master’s Voice.” This work elaborated the ghostly aspects of Frank Barraud’s painting of a dog seated before a gramophone, and the ways in which its status as the RCA Victor logo sparked its afterlife in visual culture of the early twentieth century.