Linda Kim

Linda Kim is a scholar of American art who teaches in the Art and Art History Department. Her work explores the intersections of sculpture and photography with the biopolitical regimes of science, commerce, and the law, especially where these intersections are marked on the bodies of gendered and racialized subjects. Her publications include articles on the juridical construction of obscenity in lynching photographs, the constitution of a feminized market for sculptures by women in turn-of-the-century America, and the deployment of imperial travel narratives by women artists in the 1930s. She is currently at work on a book, entitled Making the Races of Mankind: Sculpture and Race Science in the 1930s, that sets forth the representational stakes of sculpture within the racial enterprise. Making the Races of Mankind combines the study of the materials and methods of modern sculpture with an analysis of sculpture's unique discursive and visual appeal in (re)producing race, an appeal which, in the 1930s, was stimulated by sculpture's transactions with other media, such as photography, plaster casts, mannequin dioramas, and film.