Kate Cowcher

I am historian of art from Africa, with a particular focus on East Africa, on modern and contemporary practices, and on histories of colonialism and cultural entanglement between Scotland and the African continent.

My first book, Beyond the Feudal Fog: Art and Revolution in Ethiopia (forthcoming, McGill-Queen's University Press), recounts the role of art in Ethiopia's 1974 revolution, and the impact of the latter on arts and visual culture more broadly. This connects to my ongoing interests in the arts of revolution, Cold War cultures, African socialism and cultural exchange between Africa and the Eastern bloc.

My second book project, tentatively titled, Art for the People: Rural Scotland and the Global Reach of African Modernist art, is a study of a long-overlooked cluster of East and Southern African modernist paintings and prints that belongs to the Argyll Collection, a local authority art collection created in the 1960s by the writer Naomi Mitchison for the educational enrichment of Scottish children. This study has both reattributed artworks and built new connections with colleagues at Makerere University and the University of Dar es Salaam. This cluster, I argue, is a manifestation of both a progressive Scottish public art intiative, and the internationalist ambitions of independence-era artists in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia and Botswana. Art for the People involves an ongoing collaboration with colleagues in Argyll and Bute, through Culture Heritage Arts Assembly Argyll and Isles, to advocate for the continued educational value of access to original artworks, and of the arts of Africa in Scottish classrooms. See project website for more information.

My further research interests include cultural histories of the Jet Age, transnational histories of East African modernism, and Scottish-African art histories.

Kate Cowcher is a Lecturer in Art History. Prior to joining St Andrews, she was Post-Doctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

She holds a PhD (2017) from Stanford University, an MA (2009) from the Courtauld institute of Art and an MA (2005) from University of Edinburgh. Dr Cowcher is a member of the RSE's Young Academy of Scotland, and PI of the RSE-funded Africa-Scotland Art History Heritage Network.

Arts of Africa; East Africa; modern and contemporary art; African cinema; Cold War cultures; colonial and post-colonial art collections in the UK.