Katerina Korola
9 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research and teaching explore the history of photography, cinema, and modern art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the intersection of media and the environment in modern Germany. She is currently completing her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells a history of the air--and air pollution--as a photographic problem. Foregrounding the materiality of the photographic object and its atmospheric milieu, the book examines how photographic professionals grappled with smoke, dust, and smog of the industrial atmosphere, from the manufacture of photographic materials to the preparation of the final print. An excerpt from this project has appeared in Representations as “The Air of Objectivity: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Photography of Industry” and received the 2023 Emerging Scholars Publication Prize from the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art.
Concurrently, she has also begun a second book project, tentatively titled "Heliotropic Media: Botanical Experiments in Photography," which traces the intertwined histories of botany, photochemistry, and vitalist thought. Other research interests include the visual culture of science, early and silent cinema, educational and sponsored film, socialist photography and film, archival theory and aesthetics, eco-criticism, and abstraction across media (especially the monochrome format).
Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Katerina held appointments as a Humanities Teaching Fellow in Art History at the University of Chicago and Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Her research has been supported by the NOMIS Foundation, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Hanna Holborn Gray Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Fonds de la recherche du Québec (FRQSC), and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Her work can be read in the Journal of Visual Culture, Representations, Photographica, Transbordeur, and Feminist Media Histories.
Educational Background
- PhD: Art History and Cinema & Media Studies, The University of Chicago, 2021
- BFA: Art History and Film Studies, Concordia University, 2014
Specialties
- History of Photography
- Film and Media Studies
- Modern and Contemporary Art
- Environmental Humanities