Biography
Katerina Korola is a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching focuses on the history of photography, cinema, and modern art in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the intersection of technical media and environmental history. Her dissertation, “How to Photograph the Air: Photography, Cinema, and the Problem of Atmosphere in German Modernism, 1893-1933,” examined the aesthetic and material challenges that the elements of the industrial atmosphere—smoke, smog, and dust—posed for photographers, filmmakers, and critics active in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
She is currently working on a book manuscript, Picturing the Air: Photosensitive Media and the Atmosphere of Industrial Modernity, which examines early twentieth-century attempts to picture ‘fresh air’ through the media of photography and film. Other research interests include set design, studio architecture, greenhouses, and other designed environments; the intersection of media practices and nature conservation efforts; scientific photography and film; the history of botanical illustration and vegetal ornament; and abstraction across media (especially the monochrome format).
She received her joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago. Her work has been supported by the Hanna Holborn Gray Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Fonds de la recherche du Québec (FRQSC), and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
