Rate My Professor Caitlin Dalton

Caitlin Dalton is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture from Boston University in 2018, completing her dissertation titled “Imprinting Ideology, Memory, and Education in Art of the Early German Democratic Republic” under the supervision of Associate Professor Gregory Williams. Dalton's earlier degrees include an M.A. in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011, a B.F.A. in Printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2007, and a B.A. in English from Tufts University in 2006. As a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, she conducted research supported by prestigious fellowships before assuming her current teaching position, where she instructs first-year writing seminars such as those exploring contemporary art in Boston.

Dalton's academic interests center on twentieth-century German art, prints and photographs, and art and politics. Her dissertation analyzes the engagement of three artists—Oskar Nerlinger, Lea Grundig, and Edmund Kesting—with cultural memory and ideological formation within East Germany's early educational structures during the postwar period and initial years of the Cold War. These artists, repressed under National Socialism, emerged as professors and public figures in the reconstruction of German visual arts. Chapter One details Nerlinger's navigation of geopolitical and ideological boundaries as a professor in Berlin and co-editor of bildende kunst. Chapter Two addresses Grundig's incorporation of antifascist messaging and traumatic memories in her graphic works and teaching in Dresden. Chapter Three examines Kesting's promotion of modernist experimentation across art academies in Dresden, Berlin, and Potsdam. The study reveals competing artistic practices and the pivotal role of historical memory, challenging simplistic dichotomies between East German Socialist Realism and West German abstraction. Dalton was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 2016 and a Boston University Center for the Humanities Graduate Dissertation Fellowship for 2017-18.