UVA

Kristin Schroeder's research focus is 20th - century European art and visual culture. Her dissertation "How to Look Sachlich: Fashion and Objectivity in Weimar Germany" is a study of Neue Sachlichkeit's (New Objectivity) relationship to fashion and gender in works by the designer/architect Lilly Reich and the painters Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and Lotte Laserstein. The book manuscript stemming from her dissertation revises over-represented narratives about Neue Sachlichkeit and its association with masculine subjectivity and anti-fashion tendencies. It argues, instead, that the striking surface details and exaggerated formal language of Neue Sachlichkeit was a calculated materialist response to the Weimar Republic's booming culture of fashion and finds space for the possibility of feminist constructions of objectivity.

Dr. Schroeder joined the faculty in September 2017 as a postdoctoral instructor. Her teaching will focus on the representation of fashion and gender, modern art between 1900 and 1945, and interwar German visual culture. Her essay "Sobriety at a Standstill: Lotte Laserstein's Evening Over Potsdam (1930)" is forthcoming in Art History, and she is currently preparing an article on sartorial Sachlichkeit in Laserstein's New Woman portraits between 1928 and 1932.