Research Areas

Dr. Karen Bearor specializes in Twentieth-century U.S. visual culture, cultural theory, film and photo history and feminist theory. Dr. Bearor has served on the College Art Association Committee for Women in the Arts, the International Fellowships Panel of the American Association of University Women and the Association of Historians of American Art. She has received the Council on Research and Creativity Summer Research Award and the Awarded Teaching Incentive Program award for excellence in teaching at Florida State University. She also participated in an NEH Summer Institute, “The Thirties: American Literature, Art and Culture in Interdisciplinary Perspective” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has also been an avid member of the Tallahassee Rowing Club since 1996.Karen Bearor is the moderator for the international listserv American Art History Discussion List (Amart-l).

Completed Dissertations

Brandon Burrell: “Abbott Laboratories: Provisioning A Vision.”
Christal Hensley: “The Cult of Personality: Gertrude Stein and the Development of the Object Portrait in American Visual Art.”
Lana Ann Burgess: “Advancing American Art and its Afterlife: From the State Department to the University Museum.”
Leigh Anne Roach: “A Positive, Popular Art: Sources, Structure, and Impact of Gyorgy Kepes’s Language of Vision.”
Elizabeth Barnhart Heuer: “Going Postal: Surrealism and the Discourses of Mail Art.”
Michaela Merryday: “The Relevance of Jürgen Habermas’s Concept of the Public Sphere for Contemporary Public Art Practices.”
Mallory Nanny: “(Re)Framing Memory: Stories of the Vietnam War in Contemporary Photo-Based Practice.”
Marie Watkins: “Painting the American Indian at the Turn of the Century: Joseph Henry Sharp and his Patrons, William H. Holmes, Phoebe A. Hearst, and Joseph G. Butler, Jr.”
List of FSU Art History dissertations

Graduate Seminars

• Cold War Art, Photography and Film
• Memory, Monuments, and Memorials in the United States
• Documentary Photo and Film
• Harlem Renaissance: Art, Photography, Film
• Progressive Era

Selected Publications

Irene Rice Pereira: Her Paintings and Philosophy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993

“Subjectivity and Biographical Writing: The ‘Artist Named Pereira,'” in Singular Women: Feminisms and the Monograph. Kristen Frederickson and Sarah E. Webb, eds. University of California Press.

“The Design Laboratory: New Deal Experiment in Vanguardism,” Southeastern College Art Conference Review (Fall, 1996): 14-31.

Irene Rice Pereira’s Early Work: Embarking on an Eastward Journey. Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, 1994.

Chroma. Florida State University Gallery and Museum, 1994.