Profile

Molly K. Eckel is a Ph.D. candidate studying the art of the United States with Professor Rachael DeLue. Her dissertation examines a range of still life practices in the nineteenth century and their relationships to the history of science, transnational exchange of objects and knowledge, slavery, and empire. At Princeton, she has served as a preceptor for Professor DeLue’s course “Rage Against the Machine: Art and Politics in America” (Fall 2020).

She received an A.B. from Wellesley College in 2012 (magna cum laude; Phi Beta Kappa), an M.A. with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 2016, and an M.A. from Princeton in 2021. Prior to matriculating 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 (2016–2018).

Her writing has appeared in immediations: The Courtauld Institute of Art Journal of Postgraduate Research, The Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin and The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society. Her graduate work has been supported by the Mary Clothier Slade Graduate Fellowship, Art Department, Wellesley College (2018–2019) and the George S. Heyer Graduate Fellowship in American/Modern Art History, Princeton University (2019–2020).