Dr Kate Grandjouan

Biography

Dr Kate Grandjouan is Associate Professor of Art History and Associate Director for Belonging in the Humanities. She joined Northeastern University London in 2019 after teaching at The Courtauld (where she gained her PhD) and at the Institute of Continuing Education at the University of Cambridge. Kate specialises in the visual and material cultures of the eighteenth century. Her post-doctoral research has been supported by the University of Yale (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Lewis Walpole Library) and published internationally. At Northeastern, London Kate’s teaches on the Art History BA(Hons) programme and on the Art & Design pathway. Topics include visual communication, AI and creativity; art and technology; landscape, memory and visual culture; politics and print; modernism in art and design. In 2023, she won the Dean’s Prize for Teaching Excellence.

As Associate Director for Belonging, Kate is a member of the Humanities Leadership team and plays a key role in the creation of research-led and practice-based initiatives which support and validate efforts in the Humanities faculty around diversity, equity and inclusion.

In 2025/6, Kate is serving as a member of the QAA advisory Group for the History of Art, Architecture & Design Subject Benchmark Statement Review.

Qualifications

PhD in Art History, The Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), UK
MA in Art History & Archaeology, University of Maryland, MD, USA
Maîtrise de Littérature française, Université de Paris IV, (La Sorbonne), France.
BA (Combined Hons) in French and History of Art, University of Kent, UK

Academic honours

2017: Visiting Scholar, Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University), Farmington,
Connecticut, USA
2011: Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art,
London, UK

Research

As an historian of British art, I am particularly interested in the period c.1660-1830. Current research focuses on the social impact of the visual arts, on immigrant cultures, nationalism and mass media. I have published articles on 18th-century print culture with Manchester University Press, Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, British Art Studies and in Paris with the Institut National d’histoire de l’art (INHA) and with Gallimard. I currently have several strands of research. The first relates to a book-project called ‘Inventing the Enemy: British Satire and the French 1660-1790’. An emerging strand of research is concerned with visual criminology and its origins in 18th-century Britain, when printed images started to be used in courts of law as types of evidence.

More recently, I have become interested in ruin culture and memorialisation in landscape depictions. I love images and I am fascinated by the ways in which they participate in the production and transmission of knowledge, particularly in early modern societies when sophisticated techniques of visualisation were being developed. Prints, in particular, started to reach exceptional standards of empirical representation, creating “reality effects” that were distinctly new. This sense of the printed image having an evidentiary value is what interests me at the moment in relation to prints of people and places. In early modern society, printed images were powerful tools: they were capable of affirming and undermining social and political identities and serving as vectors for national and cultural myths.

At Northeastern London we teach art history as an inter-disciplinary subject. We sit within the Humanities so we work closely with colleagues in English, Philosophy and History, but we also collaborate with faculty teaching Architecture and Design and with external partners. Our teaching groups are small and this makes learning art history vibrant and conversational. Like many others, I am convinced that teaching art history facilitates empathy in that it can give us the ability to understand each other better.

Selected publications

2024: ‘Virtual Witnessing in ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ (1732): Hogarth’s visio-crime media’ for a special edition on ‘William Hogarth et le cinéma’, ‘Écrans’ 2, No. 20, 2024. Paris, Classiques Garnier.

2022: ‘Aesop, intermediality and graphic satire c.1740’ in ‘Changing Satire: Transformations and Continuities in Europe 1600 – 1830‘, edited by Cecilia Rosengren, Per Sivefors and Rikard Wingård (chapter in book) with Manchester University Press

2020: ‘Refugees, Patriotism and Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais (1748)’ in Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, pp. 287-303, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2020

2019: ‘La caricature et la « déqualification » de l’art: le cas de Henry Bunbury (1750-1810) et de Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)’ (18 pages) in Satire Visuelle (ed.) Laurent Baridon, Frédérique Desbussions et Dominic Hardy published by INHA, Paris (National Insitute for History of Art)

2019: ’Parce que les Français, comme la mer, sont sans cesse en mouvement: satires anglaises sur l’inconstance des Français’ (19 pages) Le Siècle de la Légèreté: Emergences d’un paradigme du XVIIIe siècle français for Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment edited by Marine Ganofsky (University of Edinburgh) and Jean-Alexandre Perras

2016: ’Super-size caricature: Thomas Rowlandson’s ‘Place des Victoires’ at the Society of Artists in 1783’ with British Art Studies Volume 4, an online, open access and peer-reviewed journal published by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven

Conferences and Public Lectures

June 2025: ‘Empathetic Viewing: Punishment, Feelings and the French’ for the Emotions and Senses in 18th century Visual Art and Culture Conference organised by St Mary’s University Twickenham London and held at Hogarth’s House W4 2QN

March 2024: ‘The Elegiac Landscape: Rome in British Art 1750-1830’ at the Courtauld, London for the Showcasing Art History series on ‘Antiquity, Taste and the Self: Revisiting the Grand Tour: Revisiting the Discoveries of the Grand Tour’

February, 2021: for the 94th meeting of the Ottoline Club at Northeastern University London a research paper called: ‘Creative Synergies: British Newsprint and Satirical Media, c.1740.’

September 2020: Invited speaker for the conference ‘Prints in their Place: New Research on Printed Images in their Places of Production, Sale and Use’ organised by Harvard University and the Courtauld but cancelled due to Covid. The call for papers is here: https://emworkshop.fas.harvard.edu/node/1472257

November 2019: invited speaker at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London: ’Moral Geography in Marriage à la Mode: Hogarth’s Dirty French’, International conference coinciding with the Hogarth: Place and Progress exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

October 2019: BBC, London for ‘Start the Week’ with Andrew Marr to discuss the William Hogarth exhibition at the Sir John Soane’s Museum: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009r4j

January 2019: Courtauld, London: ‘James Thornhill and his contemporaries’, public lecture for the 13th season of the ‘Showcasing Art History Lecture Series’ organised by the Public Programmes department. The theme was Britain in Europe – Encounters in Art: 18th century to 2018