Dasol Kim

Dr. Kim is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art specializing in Renaissance European art and cross-cultural visual and material culture. Before joining Bryn Mawr, she completed her doctorate in Art History at Rice University in 2024 and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Grinnell College. Her research and teaching examine visual and material culture in the early modern German-speaking lands and Northern Italy, with particular attention to artistic, political, and ecological exchanges with Africa, the Americas, and the Islamic world. Her broader interests span materiality and religious and geographic interactions, from Crusader ampullae and Islamic inkwells to Jewish-Christian relations in the Holy Roman Empire and satirical war prints from before and during the Thirty Years’ War.

She is currently completing her first book manuscript, Bodies of Otherness: Objects at Home in Early Modern Europe. The book examines portable, anthropomorphic objects—including statuettes, lighting devices, weaponry, and silverware—that combined representations of people from Africa, the Americas, and the Islamic world with materials from those regions and furnished elite domestic interiors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In studies, Kunstkammern, armories and tournament fields, and at banquet tables, owners staged these figural objects to materialize elite worldviews amid an era of expanding empires. Rather than functioning solely as isolated images, these objects engaged viewers through tactile and embodied experiences enacted in everyday rituals and displays.

By examining human figures together with materials derived from animals, minerals, and foodstuffs from distant regions, the book also foregrounds questions of labor and ecology that have received comparatively less attention in scholarship on race and power in early modern Europe.

This academic year 2026–2027, Dr. Kim is teaching courses in Renaissance art, early modern art and ecology, and the art and architecture of Venice. She is also serving as a co-instructor in the senior capstone experience.

Students interested in her courses or in art history more broadly are welcome to contact her at dkim2@brynmawr.edu.

Publication

“Domesticating the Body of the Exotic Other: The Multisensory Use of a Sixteenth-Century Brass Candlestick,” Das Mittelalter: Zeitschrift des Mediävistenverbandes 25, no. 2 (November 2020): 311–337.

Selected Conference Presentations

“Props or Actors? Performing Blackness through Decorative Arts in the Early Seventeenth-Century Dresden Court,” in the panel ‘Performing Blackness on Stage and in the Streets,’ The 72nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, San Francisco, February 2026. Sponsored by the Africana Studies Discipline, RSA.

“With Fingers and Eyes: The Transformation of Image, Material, and Space in a Seljuk Inkwell,” in the panel ‘Medieval Materialities: Material Semiotics,’ 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 2025.

“From Circumcision to Baptism: A New Context for Altdorfer’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” in the panel ‘Composing the Family and Community,’ The 71st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, March 2025.

“Lifting the Skirt, Overturning the Kaftan: Playing Gender and Race in German Wager Cups,” in the panel ‘Queer Transculturalities in the Early Modern Period,’ The 70th Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, March 2024.