served as a curatorial research fellow for the exhibition Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist, which is opening on Oct. 4 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Katherine contributed essays to an exhibition book co-published with Yale University Press. Katherine also received dissertation research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society; the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium; and Brown University's Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and Hazeltine Entrepreneurial Research Fellowship program.
Kathrinne Duffy
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of American Studies, Brown University
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Research Fellow
Doctrine of the Skull: Phrenology and Public Culture in Antebellum America
Phrenology illuminates the relationship between popular culture and new ideas about the self that emerged in antebellum America. To promote their controversial doctrine of the skull, phrenologists mobilized a range of media forms. Novel modes of introspection and observation spread through lecture tours, plaster casts, character charts, phonography, books, and other varieties of print, visual, and material culture. Practical phrenology became an influential technology of the self, promising individual self-knowledge through engagement with mechanically reproduced media. Through an examination of phrenological sites of production and experience, my dissertation explores, in a material sense, how the self was made in the era of the idealized "self-made man."
Read more about Kathrinne's work here.
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Kathrinne Duffy