Kathryn Floyd, Associate Professor of Art History, teaches courses in modern and contemporary art, as well as in the history of the arts of Africa and the history of photography at Auburn University. She has a BA (Art History and Anthropology) from Vanderbilt University, an MA (Art History) from the University of Georgia, and a PhD (Art History) from the University of Iowa where her dissertation Between Change and Continuity: documenta1955-2005 won a Graduate Deans' Distinguished Dissertation Prize in the Humanities. Before arriving at Auburn in 2008, Floyd worked at the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa Libraries and served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Skidmore College. Her teaching at Auburn University has been recognized with an SGA Outstanding Faculty Member Award (2011) and a College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award (2017).

Floyd’s research is concerned with the history of art in twentieth-century Germany with a specific focus on the history and historiography of art exhibitions and their mediation in catalogues, installation photographs, and film. She has conducted extensive research on the history of documenta, an on-going exhibition series founded in 1955 in Kassel, Germany. Her current book project explores the concept of the “installation shot,” through an exploration of photographs that document Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Expressionist sculpture Kneeling Woman (1911) at different landmark modernist exhibitions in Germany and the United States between 1912 and 1955. Floyd’s research has been supported by the DAAD and by Auburn University and the AU College of Liberal Arts. Other recent projects include guest editing a special issue of the journal Dada/Surrealism on the history of avant-garde art exhibitions and on-going collaborative research on the historiography of Dada studies.