Profile

Molly K. Eckel is a Ph.D. candidate studying the art of the United States with Professors Rachael DeLue and Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Her dissertation explores how Robert S. Duncanson’s works allegorized slavery and pictured an abolitionist future for the republic. Her graduate work and research have been supported by the Mary Clothier Slade Graduate Fellowship, Art Department, Wellesley College (2018–19), the George S. Heyer Graduate Fellowship in American/Modern Art History, Princeton University (2019–20), and the Davidson Family Fellowship, Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2021–22).

Eckel’s scholarship is also informed by collaborative projects, teaching, and peer-mentoring at Princeton. As a Graduate Writing Group Facilitator at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, she convenes a weekly virtual discussion on academic writing with fellow doctoral candidates across the university. She has served as a preceptor for two undergraduate courses in the Department of Art & Archaeology: Professor DeLue’s “Rage Against the Machine: Art and Politics in America” (Fall 2020) and Professor Alsdorf’s “Neoclassicism through Impressionism” (Fall 2021). She also contributed to Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism, an interdisciplinary digital humanities project led by Professor Arabindan-Kesson, as its inaugural Data Curator (Spring 2022).

She earned an A.B. from Wellesley College (2012), an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London (2016), and an M.A. from Princeton University (2021). Prior to undertaking graduate work at Princeton, she served as the Marcia Brady Tucker Curatorial Fellow for the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery (2016–18) and worked for Sotheby’s New York (2012–2015).