Kay Dian Kriz (born 1945) is professor emerita of art and architecture at Brown University. She is a specialist in British landscape painting and the visual culture of British colonialism and West Indian slavery.
Kay Dian Kriz was born in 1945. She received her BS from Indiana University in 1966, her BA from Western Washington University in 1981 and her MA and PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1984 and 1991 respectively.[1]
Kriz was a member of the faculty of Brown University from where she retired in 2013.[2] She is currently professor emerita of art and architecture at Brown. She is a specialist in British landscape painting and the visual culture of British colonialism and West Indian slavery.[3]
Kriz's first book was The idea of the English landscape painter: Genius as alibi in the early nineteenth century. Writing in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Ann Bermingham described the book as "an illuminating analysis of the place that landscape painting and landscape painters held within the evolving nationalistic discourse of aesthetics in the early nineteenth century" which explained how, "spurred by nationalist sentiments provoked by the Napoleonic wars, the English configuration of artistic "genius" was formulated in opposition to the French school of painting."[4] In a positive review of Kriz's Slavery, sugar, and the culture of refinement (2008), Christer Petley in H-Net praised Kriz for her insights into the visual representations of the West Indies and slavery between the late seventeenth century and the mid-nineteenth century".[5]