Dr. Gregory Named Davidson Family Fellow

By Erin Marlow, Communications Specialist in the Office of the Dean of the College

Dr. Katherine Gregory, Assistant Professor of American Art, was awarded a 2026 Davidson Family Fellowship from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The fellowship, established in 1996, supports the advancement of scholarship on American art through direct engagement with objects in the Carter’s collection. 

This summer, Dr. Gregory will use the fellowship to deepen research for her forthcoming book project, The Wanderer’s Eye: Robert Duncanson’s Radical Mobility, which examines paintings by Robert Duncanson — one of the only Black artists working in the white-dominated field of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. Specifically, her summer research will center on Duncanson’s painting The Caves (1869). Drawing on Duncanson’s close ties to the antislavery community and his extensive travel throughout the Midwest, the South, the Northeast, and abroad, Dr. Gregory suggests that the painting is both a picturesque landscape and a depiction of self-emancipation.

“Being a scholar-in-residence at the Amon Carter has been invaluable for my book manuscript,” said Dr. Gregory. “In my research, I’ve drawn on the Carter’s collections of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel diaries, watercolors and sketches of the American South, and Hudson River School paintings. As an early-career scholar, having the space and resources to write full-time during the summer is an incredible gift.”

Before joining Wake Forest as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2024, Dr. Gregory earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and her B.A. in Art & Archaeology from Princeton University. Her scholarship spans American art from the colonial period to the present, African American art, art and ecology, and archive theory. Her writing has been published in African Arts, CAA.Reviews, SEQUITUR, and Edge Effects. Dr. Gregory was also the 2022-2023 recipient of a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and has served as a curator at both the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and Testsite in Austin. 

Visit the Amon Carter Museum website to learn more about the fellowships.