Student Spotlight: Kate Louthain, PhD Student
2025-26 Jameson Fellow for American Painting & Decorative Arts
As the recipient of the graduate Jameson Fellowship for American Painting and Decorative Arts, PhD student Kate Louthain will also conduct research and work at the Bayou Bend Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston next academic year with a $15,000 stipend.
As a second year English PhD student, Kate studies nineteenth-century American literature and culture.
“Undertaking the Jameson Fellowship in my third year would enhance my positioning of nineteenth-century American furniture as a foundational component of my dissertation. My dissertation is primarily interested in the construction of a nationalized, gendered, and raced reading subject through the nineteenth-century American sentimental novel.
The Bayou Bend collection will be particularly valuable in my dissertation project, as it features numerous representative styles of chairs and seating from the nineteenth-century United States. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the furniture from the Massachusetts Room can think with the strong contingent of Massachusetts-based sentimental authors, including Maria Susanna Cummins and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. I would work to conceptualize the Massachusetts artistic and commercial scene of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a social and ideological space that filters beyond Massachusetts through circulation of publications and trade.“