Dasol Kim

Dasol Kim is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellow and faculty member in Early Modern art history at Grinnell College, where she will offer classes on transcultural early modernism and introduction to art history. Kim specializes in Renaissance and Baroque European decorative arts and prints with a transnational focus. She earned a Ph.D. in Art History at Rice University in 2024 and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin as an exchange student. She conducted object research in many museums in Europe and the US.

Kim is working on a book project on how small furnishings made in German-speaking regions and Italy and depicting images of Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans, such as small bronzes, cups, swords, guns, and gunpowder flasks, constructed the early modern Christian European elites’ conception of depicted groups by being seen, touched, and smelled in banquet halls, courtyards, Kunstkammern, and domestic interiors, focusing on the use in the 1500-1700 Holy Roman Empire. Kim presented related themes at international venues and published an article on a turbaned candlestick (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in Das Mittelalter (2020), the first in-depth study of the object. She seeks to reconstruct the embodied experience of artists and consumers in a globalized early modern world with various lenses: sensory studies, space and environment, materiality, gender, and labor.

Kim’s second project concerns the formation of national and global images in Germany through etchings and engravings printed before and throughout the Thirty Year’s War (1618-1648). She will investigate the production and circulation of German broadsheets that feature evolving political, military, and confessional conflicts among the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Transylvania, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth, Muscovy, and the Low Countries. Passionate about the interaction of religious and geographic groups and materiality, she is also working on the Jewish-Christian relationship and art in the Holy Roman Empire, fountain drawings with global themes, crusader ampulla for pilgrimages, and the artisanship of Islamic inkwells. Her paper on Islamic inkwells won the Emerging Scholars in Object-Based Learning Award from the Hirsch Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the University of Houston.