Frances Connelly, PhD
Professor - Modern Art History
Undergraduate Advisor - Art History students (last names beginning D-K)
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 11:00-1:00
Office: FA 215 Phone: (816) 235-2989
Email: connellyf@umkc.edu

Frances Connelly’s teaching and research focus is modern European art of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular interest in the intersection of art history and anthropology. Connelly’s most recent book, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, explores the seminal role of the grotesque in modern art and culture. She was the editor and contributor for Modern Art and the Grotesque, published by Cambridge University Press in 2003 (reprinted 2009). Connelly’s other research interest is primitivism and globalization. She published The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907 with Pennsylvania State University Press in 1995 (reprinted 1999). More recently, she contributed an article, “Authentic Irony: Primitivism and Its Aftermath,” to Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art, History, and Visual Culture (forthcoming). Book chapters include “John Ruskin and the Ethics of the Picturesque” to Twentieth-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Revisiting a Century, published in 2008 by the University of Delaware Press, and “Tiefsinnige Spielerie: Die Bildtradition des Grotesk-Komischen,” in Groteske! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit, Exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main and Haus der Kunst, Munich (Prestel Press, 2003).
Her research has been supported by the UKC Trustees Research Award, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, University of Missouri Research Board Fellowship, NEH Summer Seminar Grant, Smithsonian Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and Mellon Foundation Fellowship.

Degrees:
PhD in Art History from University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
MFA in Painting from University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina
BA in English Literature from Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Recent Courses Taught:
Art History 110: Introduction to the Visual Arts
Art History 497C/5567: Special Studies in 19th- and 20th-Century Art (Topics: The Grotesque in Modern Art; Primitivism and the Globalization of Art; Sublime to Site-Specific: Landscape in Modern Art)