Rate My Professor Caitlin Dalton

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.