Dr Keren Hammerschlag

Keren Hammerschlag is the Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art and Design at ANU. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British art and visual culture, and the many intersections and frictions between art and medicine during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. She convenes the CAHAT Art History and Curatorial Studies Major and Minor, and is on the steering committee of the ANU Health Humanities Network.  

In 2010 she received her PhD in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. From 2010-2013 she was a Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Humanities and Health at King's College London. From 2013-2018 she taught in Art History and Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She was one of the founders of Georgetown's first Disability Studies Minor and served as Assistant Director of the Center for Jewish Civilization from 2016-2018. 

In 2015 she published her first monograph, 'Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection' (Ashgate), which offers a macabre counter-biography of the President of the Victorian Royal Academy, Frederic Lord Leighton. She has published journal articles on art and religion in the Victorian period, colour and whiteness, gender and Jewishness, race in nineteenth-century anatomical illustration, medical portraiture, and medical and artistic looking. In 2021 she received an ANU Futures Scheme Award for work in the Visual Medical Humanities. 

Her recent book, 'The Chosen Race: Troubling Whiteness in Victorian Painting' (University of California Press, 2026), offers the first account of the representation of racial supremacy, racial difference and racial indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria. 

BArtTH Hons. (UNSW), MA, PhD (Courtauld)

Victorian and Edwardian Art and Visual Culture

Visual Medical Humanities

Gender and the Body

Representations of Race 1850-1914

Art and Religion in the Nineteenth Century