Faculty and Staff

Biography

Keri Watson is an associate professor of art history, affiliated faculty in the Florida Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Texts and Technology Ph.D. programs, and the director of the Florida Prison Education Project. She serves as a co-executive editor for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century art, American art, the art of Disney and self-taught artists, and African American Art. Dr. Watson's research, which focuses on the power of art to contribute to and challenge stereotypical representations of race, nationality, gender, sex, and dis/ability, has been recognized and supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists.

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
• Art of the American South
• Disability Studies

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Selected Publications

Books

• 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. “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

• 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 of Historical Materials

Activities

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

Director, The Florida Prison Education Project

Courses

• Spring 2023
• Fall 2022
• Summer 2022
• Spring 2022
• Fall 2021
• Summer 2021