K. Dian Kriz is Professor Emerita of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. She obtained a B.S. in Chemistry with distinction from Indiana University in 1966; she worked for Chemical Abstracts and co-published an article with Prof. George Kriz (WWU)) in the Journal of Chemical Education before pursuing studies in art history. She receive her BA in art history from Western Washington University in 1981, her MA in Art History from the University of British Columbia in 1984, and her PhD from UBC in May 1991, joining Brown’s faculty in September of that year. She is the author of The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (Yale, 1997) and co-editor (with Geoff Quilley) of An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830 (Manchester, 2003). In 2008 she published Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (Yale Univerity Press), which was awarded the prize for best book on art after 1800, by the Historians of British Art in 2010 and was chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 by Choice Magazine. Among the fellowships she has are NEH and Mellon Fellowships at the Huntington Library, a senior fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and a fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art. At Brown she has offered courses on the art of the French Revolution, the visual exchange between East Asia and Western Europe, and the visual culture of the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century.
