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 anti-slavery themes and pictured an abolitionist future for the republic. During the 2023–2024 academic year, she will hold the Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her graduate work at Princeton has also been supported by the Mary Clothier Slade Graduate Fellowship, the George S. Heyer Graduate Fellowship in American/Modern Art History, the Davidson Family Fellowship at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Council on Science and Technology University Administrative Fellowship.  

She holds an A.B. from Wellesley College, an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and an M.A. from Princeton University. 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.