Karen Koehler

Karen Koehler received her B.A. in English literature and M.S. in library science from the University of Illinois, her master's in art history from the University of Massachusetts, and an M.F.A and Ph.D. in art and archaeology from Princeton University.

Koehler is a 2016 recipient of Hampshire's Gruber Award for Excellence in Advising and teaches courses in modern and contemporary art, architecture, photography, and design, with an emphasis on connections between the built environment, visual culture, and critical theory.

In addition to her edited volume The Built Surface: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts, she has published widely on dialogues between architecture and pictures, including an essay on Louise Bourgeois, architecture and autobiography, for a special edition of Art in Translation, which she also co-edited with Jeffrey Saletnik, on "Translation and Architecture" (March 2018).

In 2008, Koehler served as guest curator and sole author of "Bauhaus Modern," an exhibition and catalogue at the Smith College Museum of Art. Other recent publications on the Bauhaus include catalogue essays for the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Gallery of New South Wales, as well as an essay on the Bauhaus and Gestalt in Joseph Albers: Intersecting Colors at the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, and a forthcoming essay on "Bauhaus Doubles" for Bauhaus Bodies, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press.

Recipient of recent grants from the NEH, Mellon, and Kress and Graham Foundations, Koehler is currently completing an intellectual history of the architect Walter Gropius for Reaktion Books (distributed in the U.S. by the University of Chicago Press), a project for which she received a senior fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery in Washington.