Kathleen Pierce

Kathleen Pierce

Contributor

Kathleen Pierce received her Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University in May 2019. Her research focuses on the intersection of art and medicine in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and Francophone Africa. Her dissertation project, “Surface Tension: Skin, Disease, and Visuality in Third Republic France,” examines a broad range of objects—from dermatological illustrations and wax-cast moulages, to public health posters and avant-garde painting—to understand relationships between the surface of the modern body and the surface in modern art.

Reviews

Exhibition Review: Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis

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One hundred years after the 1918 flu epidemic, Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis opened at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). The exhibition, which ran through April 2019 in association with the New York Academy of Medicine, asked visitors to consider the complex relationship between New Yorkers and pathogenic microorganisms, both… Read more →

Health and Wellness

Are Our Genes Really Our Fate? DNA’s Visual Culture and the Construction of Genetic Truth

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The direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andme has recently been described by journalist Erika Check Hayden as a “unicorn.”1 For Hayden, this Silicon Valley idiom describes the company’s one billion dollar valuation while also capturing the rare opportunity it affords to scientists: its two million customers make up the largest available pool of gene-linked health data.2… Read more →