Profile

Ariel Kline studies nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century art. Her dissertation, “Of Monsters and Mirrors: Art and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” examines how paintings of monsters generated reflections or doubles and, relatedly, how reflections or doublings generated alternate imaginings of monstrosity in Victorian painting. It asks to what degree painting exposed some of the key rhetorical binaries invoked in pro-imperial discourse as a hollow set of mirror images.

Ariel 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.”

Her research has been generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Clark Art Institute. In 2023, she was the recipient of a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship at Princeton University.