Faculty and Staff

Keri Watson

Keri Watson, Ph.D.

  • Assistant Director, Associate Professor
  • Email: [email protected]
  • Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays noon - 2:00pm
  • Campus Location: VAB105H

Biography

Keri Watson is Assistant Director of the School of Visual Arts and Design, Associate Professor of Art History, affiliated faculty in the Florida Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Texts and Technology Ph.D. programs, and Director of the Florida Prison Education Project. She serves as a Board Member for the Association of Historians of American Art, Co-Executive Editor and Finance and Grants Manager for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is the author of Florida's New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals (forthcoming), and co-author (with Julia Listengarten) of Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations In Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices (2023), and co-author (with Keidra Daniels Navaroli) of This is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States (2023). She is the co-editor (with Timothy Hiles) of the Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (2022). Dr. Watson's research has been recognized and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. She teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century art, American art, the art of Disney and self-taught artists, and African American Art. 

Education

  • Ph.D. in Art History from Florida State University (2010)
  • M.A. in Art History from Florida State University (2006)
  • B.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities from University of West Florida (2004)

Research Interests

  • Art of the United States
  • Landscapes of the American South
  • Disability Studies

Recent Research Activities

Art of the United States, Florida landscapes, Depression-era photography

Selected Publications

Books

Films

Articles/Essays

  • Watson, Keri. “You Know Who I am? I’m Mr. John Paul’s Boy.” Southern Cultures 29, no. 1 (2023): 46-57.

  • Watson, Keri. “Fantasies and Freak Shows: Salvador Dalí’s Dream of Venus.” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 13, no. 1 (2022): 98-112. https://jsa-asu.org/index.php/JSA/article/view/243
  • Watson, Keri. “‘With a Smile and a Song’: Representations of People with Dwarfism in 1930s Cinema.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 14:2 (2020): 137-54. Print.
  • Watson, Keri. “Precarious Memory: Eudora Welty and the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum.” Eudora Welty Review 12:1 (2020): 9-26. Print.
  • Listengarten, Julia, Keri Watson, and Kate Kilpatrick. “Building Affective Solidarity and Creating Healthier Communities through the Arts: Interactions, Elaborations, and Interventions in Multiple Contexts.” The International Journal of Arts Education 14:4 (2019):1-14. Print.
  • Listengarten, Julia and Keri Watson. “Staging Representations: Reflections on Performing Activism in a Visual Art and Theatre Collaboration.” Scene 6:1 (2019):21-50.
  • Watson, Keri. “You’ve Got Art: Florida’s Post Office Murals.” In Florida Studies Review. Edited by Allyson D. Marino and Marcy L. Galbreath, 88-101. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018.
  • Watson, Keri. "Curating Controversy in the Trump Era." Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse (2017). 
  • Watson, Keri, and Anastasia Salter. “Secret Societies of the Avant-garde,” GLS 11 Conference Proceedings, eds. Kyrie H. Caldwell et al (2016): 440-43.
  • Watson, Keri, and Anastasia Salter. "Playing Art Historian: Teaching 20th-Century Art through Alternate Reality Gaming," International Journal for Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning 1:1 (2016): 100-111.
  • Watson, Keri. “Disability in Art History.” Art History Teaching Resources Lesson Plans (2015). https://arthistoryteachingresources.org/lessons/disability-in-art-history/
  • Watson, Keri. "'Before We Were Us, We Were Them': Curating Controversy," Journal of Museum Education 39 (2014): 96-107. 
  • Watson, Keri. “Parody as Political Tool in Patricia Cronin’s Memorial to a Marriage.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 43:2 (2010): 79-94.    
  • Fredericks, Keri. “The Country Cousin: Advocating an Arcadian America.” Athanor 26 (2008): 81-89.

Book Sections/Chapters

  • Watson, Keri. “Building the World of Tomorrow: Disability, Eugenics, and Sculpture at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” In Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-first Century. Edited by Ann Millet-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie, 187-202. London: Routledge, 2022. https://www.routledge.com/Disability-and-Art-History-from-Antiquity-to-the-Twenty-First-Century/Mill...
  • Watson, Keri. “Dalí’s Dream of Venus: Sex, Surrealism, and Eugenics at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” In Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation. Edited by Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzon, 27-40. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021.

  • Watson, Keri. “Practicing Aesthetic Resilience through Collaboration.” In Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis. Edited by Bram Ieven, Eliza Steinbock and Marijke de Valck, 169-178. New York: Routledge, 2020.

  • Watson, Keri. “Picturing the Other: Disability and Difference in Eudora Welty’s Photographs and Stories.” Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-first Century Approaches. Eds. Julia Eichelberger and Mae Miller Claxton. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.    
  • Watson, Keri and Patsy Moskal. “Scaling an Art History Reacting to the Past Game for Use at a Large Public University.” Playing to Learn with Reacting to the Past. Eds. C. Edward Watson and Thomas Chase Hagood. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.    
  • Watson, Keri. "Difference and Disability: The Photography of Margaret Bourke-White." Disability and Art History. Eds. Ann Millet-Gallant and Elizabeth Howie. New York: Routledge, 2017. 
  • Watson, Keri. Eudora Welty’s Making a Date, Grenada, Mississippi: One Photograph, Five Performances.” Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race. Ed.Harriet Pollack. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013.
  • Wylder, Viki Thompson and Keri Fredericks. “Evoke/Invoke/Provoke: A Case Study of Judy Chicago’s Feminist Pedagogy, Vanderbilt University, Spring Semester 2006." In Florida Without Borders: Women at the Intersections of the Local and Global, edited by Sharon Kay Masters, 141-60. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008.    

Book Reviews

  • Watson, Keri. “Annette Trefzer, Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty’s Photographic Reflections.” Eudora Welty Review 14 (2022).

  • Watson, Keri. “Lauren Kroiz, Cultivating Citizens: The Regionalist Work of Art in the New Deal Era.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6.1 (2020). https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/cultivating-citizens/

Awards

  • 2023       Pabst-Steinmetz Award for Arts and Wellness
  • 2020       UCF Award for Outstanding Service
  • 2019       UCF Office of Faculty Excellence Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award
  • 2019       UCF Office of Faculty Excellence Research Incentive Award
  • 2019       UCF Office of Faculty Excellence Teaching Incentive Program Award
  • 2018       Pabst-Steinmetz Award for Arts and Wellness
  • 2018       Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Outstanding Exhibition 
  • 2017       Fulbright-Terra Foundation Award in the History of American Art
  • 2017       UCF Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award
  • 2013       Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Best Exhibition

Activities

Co-Executive Editor, Panorama: Journal of Historians of American Art

Director, The Florida Prison Education Project


Courses

Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
17747 ARH2500 History of Non-western Art Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
18628 ARH3471 Art in the Last 25 Years Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
18629 ARH3888 Art of Walt Disney Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
93449 ARH3880 History of Immersive Exp. Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
92386 ARH3888 Art of Walt Disney Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
92397 ARH4430 19th Century Art Mixed-Mode/Reduce Seat-Time(M) Tu 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM Unavailable
No Description Available

No courses found for Summer 2024.

Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
10011 ARH2500 History of Non-western Art Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
10941 ARH3888 Art of Walt Disney Web-Based (W) Unavailable
No Description Available
Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
92931 ARH3683 Southern Folk Arts Web-Based (W) Available

This course explores the visual and material culture of the American South and considers how they serve as a window into the region’s history. We will see how the South’s distinctive sense of place defines its literature, musical heritage, food, and visual art. From small farms to urban neighborhoods, from the region itself to more distant worlds of the southern diaspora, stories, food, music, and art chronicle places and the people who live within them.
81774 ARH3888 Art of Walt Disney Web-Based (W) Available
The goal of this course is to consider Walt Disney and his company in relation to art, society, and culture during the American Century. You will learn about Disney’s contributions within the realms of animation, film, and the theme park. A constant sub-theme will be the relationship between high art and popular art, as exemplified in the work of the Disney Studio. 
81796 ARH4430 19th Century Art Mixed-Mode/Reduce Seat-Time(M) W 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM Available
This course surveys the trends and developments in art during the long nineteenth century, paying special attention to the art of the United States and Western Europe. 
Course Number Course Title Mode Session Date and Time Syllabus
50583 ARH3888 Art of Walt Disney Web-Based (W) B Unavailable
No Description Available

Updated: Dec 1, 2023