Kathryn holds a D.Phil in French Literature from the University of Oxford (Balliol College) and a PhD in Art History from the University of London (Birkbeck College). She is a Rhodes Scholar and, prior to a career in academia, was a corporate lawyer in the City of London. Over fourteen years, Kathryn led teams of lawyers on large-scale mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, and IPOs, becoming a partner in a leading international law firm in 2006. This background in corporate finance has spurred her research into contemporary art markets and art finance.
Kathryn joined Loughborough in 2016. Prior to this she was a lecturer at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In recent years, Kathryn’s research has been funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Independent Social Research Foundation, French Studies, and the Association for Art History. She has held visiting fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University; Tulane University; the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Art (Washington DC); the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Yale University); and the Getty Research Institute. In 2026, she is an Invited Professor at the Université Paris-8.
Kathryn was appointed to the AHRC peer review college in 2022. She has been an invited project reviewer for the Swiss Science Foundation; the NWO (Netherlands); the European Research Council; Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium); Flemish Research Council (Belgium); Austrian Science Fund; National Research Foundation, South Africa; and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Kathryn is the author of five monographs and editor of six essay collections. She has also edited special issues of The Journal of Art Market Studies, The Journal of Visual Practice, and Nottingham French Studies. She has authored over fifty articles and book chapters.
Modern and Contemporary Art: Kathryn’s publications in this field span nineteenth-century French painting and literature, contemporary art, and museum studies. Much of her research sheds light on ways in which contemporary artists confront history and use existing works as a means of reflecting critically on issues that shape the present. She is a specialist in the art of Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse and writes regularly for major museum exhibitions. Her current research is on the book culture of the Harlem Renaissance.
Art Markets: Kathryn’s work on art markets involves close examination of the values and epistemic cultures that have developed around artists, art objects, and cultures of display. Her recent articles in this area have been published in the Journal of Visual Art Practice, Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, and the Journal for Art Market Studies. Her book Art Auctions: Spectacle and Value in the 21st-Century was published in 2024 by Lund Humphries and Sotheby’s Institute of Art. Kathryn is a member of the Steering Committee of the Women Art Dealers Digital Archives and is the founder and series editor of Contextualizing Art Markets for Bloomsbury Academic.
AI and Art History: In 2020, Kathryn edited the Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History (Routledge). Following a British Academy Talent Development award in 2021, she has co-developed projects in computer vision analyses of artworks and collaborates closely with computer scientists active in this field. Her work explores the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies in art historical research and teaching. Her edited collection Art History and Artificial Intelligence: Looking at Images in an Algorithmic Culture is published in the Proceedings of the British Academy (2026). Kathryn is the Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded project ‘Modelling a Museum of AI Cultures’ at Loughborough University (£234,316).
At Loughborough, Kathryn teaches across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in addition to supervising a number of doctoral researchers. At the undergraduate level she teaches on core and optional BSc modules including: Media and Social Change; Screen Cultures; Television and Society; dissertation supervision.
Kathryn has also supervised numerous MA dissertations and has taught on modules including Research Methodologies; Media and the Cultural Industries; and Cultural Heritage
Kathryn is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Kathryn has supervised the following PhDs to completion:
- 2022: Yoram Eshkol-Rokach: Private Museums of Contemporary Art and the Shaping of Heritage
- 2022: Mikaela Assolent: A Disidentified Pedagogy: Contesting Audience Categorisations in Contemporary Art Institutions
- 2022: Jennifer Hankin: Possible Worlds: Utopian Topographies in Contemporary Art
- 2021: Tom Nys: Contesting Abortion Stigma Through Contemporary Visual Art
- 2021: Sophia Kier-Byfield: Reconceptualizing Feminist Pedagogies in Higher Education: Theoretical Narratives, Political Frameworks and Institutional Dynamics
- 2020: Franziska Wilmsen: Commissioning the Contemporary: Museum Brands, Art Trends and Creative Networks
She is currently supervising the following doctoral researchers:
- Anna Kanunikova: Unravelling the Canon: Women, Textiles, and the Eastern-European Avant-Gardes
- Ghadeer Abualshamat: Art World Creation in Saudi Arabia: From the 1960s to Vision 2030
- Yumeng Zhang: Artificial Intelligence and the Museum: Opportunities, Trends, and Tensions
- Emad Alatoom: Artificial Intelligence Algorithms and Interactive Advertising
- Jenny Zhou: Modern Women Artists and the Occult through a Jungian Lens
- He Jiang: Financialization and Social Stratification in the Art World: An Ethnographic Study of Artists’ Pathways and Barriers
Recent External PhD Examined
Kathryn has examined ten PhDs, four as Internal Examiner and six as External Examiner (Goldsmiths College, University of London; Glasgow University; Ben-Gurion University; Edinburgh University; University of Birmingham; Australian National University).
Kathryn is a Recognised Supervisor by the UK Council for Graduate Education. She is keen to hear from prospective doctoral researchers interested in working on modern and contemporary art, art markets, or intersections of AI, heritage, and art history.
- (ed.) Artificial Intelligence and Art History: Looking at Images in an Algorithmic Culture (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2026)
- ‘Artificial Exchange: Chatbots and the Ethics of Museum Experience Design’, in Museum Experience Design at a Time of Transformation, eds L. Calvi, A. Vermeeren and A. Sabiescu (Springer, 2025)
- ‘Eric Fischl: Navigating the Weight of History’ in Late America: Eric Fischl, ed. Heather Sealy Lineberry, exh. cat. Phoenix Art Museum (Milan: Scala, 2025).
- Art Auctions: Spectacle and Value in the 21st Century (Lund Humphries/Sotheby’s Institute of Art, 2024)
- Dialogues with Degas: Influence and Antagonism in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2023).
- ‘Humanist-in-the-Loop: Machine Learning and the Analysis of Style in Painting’, in Modelling Visual Aesthetics, Emotion, and Artistic Style, eds. James Z. Wang and Reginald Adams (Springer, 2023), pp. 219–227
- ‘From the Harlem Renaissance to Black Dada: Adam Pendleton’s Entangled Histories’, Burlington Contemporary (November 2022)
- ‘Art Markets, Epistemic Authority, and the Institutional Curation of Knowledge’, Cultural Studies, pp. 1–21 (Feb, 2022)
- Henri Matisse (Reaktion, 2021)
- ‘When Museums Meet Markets’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 19:3 (2020)
- (ed.) Digital Humanities and Art History (Routledge, 2020).
- Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
- Henri Matisse (Reaktion, 2021)
- (ed.) Art Markets and Museum Futures, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 19:3 (2020)
- (ed.) Politics and the Art Market, Journal of Art Market Studies, 3:1 (2019)
- (ed.) Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2017)
- (ed.) Interactive Contemporary Art: Participation in Practice (I.B. Tauris, 2014),
- (ed.) The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2013),
- Women Readers in French Painting 1870–1890 (Routledge 2012)