Catherine Stuer

Dr. Catherine Stuer studies premodern to early 20th century Chinese visual and material culture, and teaches East Asian art history at Denison University. She holds an MA in Chinese Art History from the National Taiwan University, and a PhD in Chinese Art History from The University of Chicago. Dr. Stuer’s current research focuses on the representation of urban landscapes in maps, paintings and printed images, early 20th-century photography of memory sites and cultural heritage, and 19th-century pictorial life narratives in printed books. Her work engages critical approaches to spatial and environmental production, memory and heritage discourse, intermedia relations, and the intersections of landscape and self-representation. Dr. Stuer’s MPWIG project explores the nature of guji (ancient trace) as artefact and as category of place-representation in local gazetteers, to address questions about the connection of guji to imperial vs. local networks and forms of spatial production, and to historical and local modalities of material memory. Dr. Stuer received a Henry Luce Foundation/American Council for Learned Societies Program in China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship from September 2017 through July 2018 for her project “The Disciplinary Lens: Photographic Vision, Cultural Remains, and Early Chinese Art History and Archaeology.”