Faculty and Staff

Keri Watson, Ph.D.

• Assistant Director, Professor
• Email: Keri.Watson@ucf.edu
• Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays noon - 2:00pm
• Campus Location: VAB105H

Biography

Keri Watson (PhD 2010, Florida State University) 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 (2024), 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 work 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, the Laughing Gull Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. She teaches 19th Century Art, American Art, the Art of Walt Disney, the History of Immersive Design, Southern Folk Arts, 20th Century Art, Art in the Last 25 Years, Non-western Art, 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
• Carceral Landscapes
• Disability Studies
• Florida Studies

Recent Research Activities

Dr. Watson's research, supported by more than 1.2 million dollars in grants from both federal agencies and private philanthropic organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Humanities Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, and the Laughing Gull Foundation, explores the intersections of US art, incarceration, and disability. In 2020, she curated Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape, an exhibition of contemporary work by artists engaging with mass incarceration and the work of the Florida Prison Education Project (FPEP), an initiative she founded that brings higher education to people in prison (50 college classes to 750 men and women in Central Florida since 2018). Her work with FPEP elucidates the connections between incarceration, race, and disability and promotes the role of the arts in restorative justice. She recently chaired panels on this topic at SECAC and CAA and is editing a collection of essays, America’s Carceral Landscape: From Plantation to Prison for a university press. Another recent book, Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education (Palgrave) examines the role of the arts in universities, prisons, and elder care centers. Early reviews describe it as “an important contribution to the fields of higher education and arts and wellness.” Also published in 2023, This Is America: Reviewing the Art of the United States (Oxford) “decentralizes American art history by focusing on voices often excluded from the traditional narrative” and “brings artists and artworks into dynamic, unexpected conversations using themes and subjects that are highly relevant in today’s world.” Dr. Watson's expertise in art and disability is evident in The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (hardback 2022; paperback 2024), a collection described in a recent issue of Visual Studies as “an accessible and highly engaging resource for students and scholars alike [that] helps fill a longstanding gap in art history.” In further recognition of her work in this area, she was invited to guest curate Silent Protest: Perspectives on War and Disability for the Rollins Museum of Art, contribute a chapter on art and disability to Art History: A Thematic Approach, Renaissance to the Present, and have received three Arts & Wellness Innovation Awards from the Pabst-Steinmetz Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that supports the expansion of art opportunities to people with disabilities. Finally, Dr. Watson is one of thirty-seven expert speakers selected to serve on the Florida Humanities Speakers Bureau. She gives public talks across the state on Florida landscape painting, Florida's New Deal post office murals, and Walt Disney.

Selected Publications

Books

• Watson, Keri. Florida's New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2024. https://www.amazon.com/Floridas-Parks-Office-Murals-History/dp/1467156965
• Forthcoming Listengarten, Julia and Keri Watson. Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations in Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Performing-Collaborations-Higher-Education/dp/3031298101

• Watson, Keri, and Keidra Navaroli. This Is America: Re-viewing the Art of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/this-is-america-9780190084882?cc=us&lang=en&

• Watson, Keri and Timothy W. Hiles. Routledge Companion to Art and Disability. New York and London: Routledge, 2022. https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Art-and-Disability/Watson-Hiles/p/book/9780367444785
• Watson, Keri. Art of the Non-Western World. Dubuque: Great River Learning, 2017.

Films

• Watson, Keri, and Tim Reid. One More Dollar. Film. 2017.
• Watson, Keri. The Burden of History. Digital Story, 2016.
• Watson, Keri, Milos Adjinovis and Yson Dickson. Ward Hall: King of the Sideshow. Film, 2015.
• Watson, Keri, Milos Adjinovis and Yson Dickson. Johnny Meah: Czar of Bizarre. Film, 2015.

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

• 2024       UCF Office of Faculty Excellence Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award
• 2024       UCF Office of Faculty Excellence Research Incentive Award
• 2024       UCF Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award
• 2023       Pabst-Steinmetz Award for Arts and Wellness
• 2020       UCF University 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

• Spring 2026
• Fall 2025
• Summer 2025
• Spring 2025
• Fall 2024
• Summer 2024