Caitlin Beach

Beach Photo, Art History Faculty

Assistant Professor of Art History

Faculty Memorial Hall 443
Fordham University-Rose Hill Campus
441 E. Fordham Road
Bronx, NY 10458

Phone: 718-817-4892
Email: [email protected]

Office Hours: By appointment

Education

AB, Bowdoin College; M.A., MPhil, Ph.D., Columbia University

Specialization

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American art; visual and material culture of the Atlantic world; histories of slavery, colonialism, and diaspora; sculpture.

Biography 

Caitlin Meehye Beach is an Assistant Professor of Art History, Affiliated Faculty in African & African American Studies and interim co-director (2023-24) of the Asian American Studies Program at Fordham.  Her teaching and research focus on transatlantic art histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Areas of interest within this include sculpture and the decorative arts, and art’s intersection with histories of racial capitalism and racial formation. 

Caitlin is the author of Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (University of California Press, 2022), which was a recipient of the 35th Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Phillips Book Prize from the Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland. Research for this project was supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Royal Academy of Arts. She is currently at work on a book project on the visual and material cultures of Asian and Afro-Asian diasporas in the nineteenth-century United States. Previous writing on sculpture, race, and other topics has appeared in British Art StudiesNka: Journal of Contemporary African ArtNineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Art in America, as well as various edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.

Before coming to Fordham Beach taught in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University.  She holds an A.B. from Bowdoin College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

  • Nineteenth Century Art
    Art and the Black Atlantic
    Museums from Revolution to Restitution
    History of Photography

  • Books

    Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (University of California Press, forthcoming 2022)

    Articles

    "Reproducing and Refusing Carpeaux," in Fictions of Emancipation: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux Recast, ed. Wendy S. Walters and Elyse Nelson (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2022).

    With Roberto Visani. "Unpacking Wedgwood:  A Conversation with Roberto Visani, "British Art Studies no. 21 (Autum 2021).

    "Amoy Chinqua, Joseph Willems, and the Politics of Scale," in "The Chelsea Porcelain Case, British Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art," ed. Iris Moon, British Art Studies no. 21 (Autumn 2021).

    "Francesco Pezzicar's L'Abolizione della schiavitù across Empires," in Republics and Empires:  American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840-1970, ed. Melissa Dabakis and Paul H.D. Kaplan (Manchester University Press, 2021), 154-170.

    “John Bell’s American Slave in the Context of Production and Patronage,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 15, no. 2 (Summer 2016)

    “Meta Warrick Fuller’s Mary Turner and the Memory of Mob Violence,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (Spring 2015): 16-27.

    Selected book reviews and catalogue entries

    Review, Charmaine Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire in the Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Routledge, 2016), caa.reviews, April 2018, doi: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2018.103

    “Kara Walker, 40 Acres of Mules (2015),” Museum Research Consortium Dossier: Race and the Museum. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2017, 85-88.