Caroline Riley is Research Associate in the Art and Art History Department at UC, Davis. She specializes in the visual culture of the 18th century to the present. She earned a Ph.D. from Boston University as the Adelson Fellow in American Art and a Master's in American material culture from the Winterthur Program. Since 2019, she has served as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow; the Terra Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Judith B. and Burton P. Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; a John W. Kluge Center Fellow at the Library of Congress; and a NEH Long-Term Fellow at the New York Public Library. She has taught courses on contemporary art, modern architecture, decorative arts, the cultural history of museums, and design history. Her research and publications focus on a variety of topics, including Pictorialist photography, 19th-century portrait painters, American craft, American vernacular art in Paris, the formation of the American art canon, and the politicization of American art in Europe.
Her first book, MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938: Building and Politicizing American Art (2023), is available through the University of California Press. Her next book is tentatively titled, Thérèse Bonney and the Power of Global Syndicated Photography.