Ep. 69- Katherine Poole-Jones

Welcome listeners to 5 Questions: A Critical Mass for the Visual Arts Podcast in which we ask 5 questions of our interviewees aimed at positioning and contextualizing their respective bodies of work within the St. Louis artworld.This episode we’re talking with Katherine Poole-Jones.

Katherine Poole-Jones is Professor of Art History at SIUE, specializing in early modern Italy. She teaches both halves of the introductory survey course in art history, as well as upper level courses on the Italian Renaissance, the Northern Renaissance, the Baroque period, Islamic art and architecture, and the public monument in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. She also team-teaches an Interdisciplinary Studies course on the history of museums and is very active in the Women’s Studies Department at SIUE, frequently giving lectures to support the program, and also teaching two of her most popular courses, Women in Art and Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, as cross-listed offerings.

Professor Poole-Jones received a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 2005-2006 to complete the research the resulted in her dissertation, The Medici Grand Dukes and the Art of Conquest: Ruling Identity and the Formation of a Tuscan Empire, 1537-1609, and she has published several essays on the Medici family and their use of patronage as propaganda. She also has presented her research widely, including at the Renaissance Society of America conference and the College Art Association conference, as well as maintains a strong relationship with the St. Louis Art Museum where she has presented numerous gallery talks as well as the Women’s History Month lecture in 2014. Her current research project, “Civic Identity and Ideology: The Public Monuments of Forest Park, St. Louis, 1876-1917,” investigates the public monuments of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century St. Louis and the role they played in shaping collective memory and disseminating a potent civic identity for the city in the years after the Civil War. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers University (2007) and an M.A., also in art history, from American University (2002).

5 Questions is a program by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts – a nonprofit, self-formed visual arts collaborative dedicated to promoting, enhancing and initiating contemporary visual art in the St. Louis region.

With Katherine Poole-Jones and Joe Kohlburn

Editor – Sarah Hammond

Producer – Brett Williams