I earned my Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley, mentored by T.J. Clark, Anne Wagner, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes. My intellectual commitments remain in critical aesthetics embedded in material analysis, feminism, cultural theory and intellectual history. I also hold an M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, where object-centered research was facilitated by extraordinary museum collections, and a B.A. in Political Economies from the University of California, Berkeley, with a specialization in international mass media. I spent a year studying political science and art history at the Université Lumière Lyon II. Before joining the academic staff at UCC in 2004, I worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., collaborating on the pathbreaking Dada exhibition of 2005 and assisting in the Department of Photographs. My work, broadly speaking, lies in the intersections of subject formation and the aesthetic-material world of modernity. I have published widely on photography and photography theory, political photomontage, Dada tactics, artists' magazines and social intervention, and gender politics. My work has appeared in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, October, New German Critique, and Kritische Berichte, in major international exhibition catalogues and foundational texts on photography, and has been supported by the Social Science Research Council/Berlin Program, the Fulbright Foundation, DAAD, the Mellon Foundation, the Hans Arp Stiftung, Athena Swan, and the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. "Manufacturing Discontent: John Heartfield's Mass Medium" of 2009 was among the top three downloads on UCC's Open Research Archive for several years. https://cora.ucc.ie

I also serve as Contributing Writer for Source Magazine: Thinking Through Photography, a magazine of contemporary photography in Ireland and Britain.

My first monograph Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (University of California Press, 2014) offers a groundbreaking study of Heartfield's pioneering AIZ montages, probing the intersections of affective pictures, radical politics and technologies of mass replication in interwar Europe. The book was lauded as foundational in a wide range of reviews including CAA Reviews: A Publication of the College Art Association, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, American Historical Review, German Studies Review, among others. A study of capitalism and democracy in crisis, the book traces the complex history of leftist photographic retort during the rise and consolidation of fascism in Europe, and implicitly sheds light on our own moment of economic destabilisation and technological immersion.

My second monographic book project Objectivity, Viewed Obliquely: Rethinking the Neue Sachlichkeit orbits the human subject, psychoanalysis and phenomenology in the era before sound film, and aims to rethink the often-maligned realism of interwar art. Aspects of that project have been published in October, and presented at invited talks at New York University's Deutsches Haus, Gothenburg University, Sweden, St. Andrews University, Scotland, and Concordia University, Canada, and supported by the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington DC.

I welcome Ph.D. proposals on modern and contemporary art that investigate aesthetics, politics and activism; gender and body politics; photography and photomontage. Current PhD projects that I am advising include feminist sculptural aesthetics in 1990s Ireland, the memorialization of Mother and Baby Homes, the phenomenology of exhibition design, and new media art.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the interpenetrations of art, materiality and politics, investigating the ways in which artists mobilize the qualities of specific media--photography, photomontage, collage, drawing, sculptural objects, painting, and the human body--to stage interventions and encourage cognitive shifts in the socio-political sphere. The dialogue between object and beholder is of particular interest, as is the specific historical matrix that gives rise to an aesthetic retort.

My research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, DAAD, and the Social Science Research Council.

Research Grants

Project: IRC"GOIPG/2015/2370 Sarah Kelleher" Dr S Kriebal [X] ( R16664) Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-OCT-15 / 31-MAR-19
Award: €71,740.00

Project: Stiftung Arp, Berlin: Arp Constructed: Photography and the Reproduction of Legacy ( )
Funding Body:
Start/End Dates: 01-JUN-18 / 31-JUL-18
Award: €2,400.00

Project: The Curated Encounter: Experiencing the Contemporary Art Exhibition. ( R20326)
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-SEP-21 / 01-SEP-21
Award: €27,500.00

Project: Paul Mellon Fellow, Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Art Washington DC ( )
Funding Body: Mellon Foundation
Start/End Dates: 01-NOV-21 / 31-DEC-21
Award: €12,000.00

Project: An Archaeology of Machine Vision: The Technical Image in Systems Art ( R21165)
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-SEP-22 / 01-OCT-26
Award: €82,500.00

Project: THe Traumatic Memory of WWI in the Work of Otto Dix 1914=1934 ( )
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-OCT-12 / 30-SEP-15
Award: €65,000.00

Project: The antifascist montages of John Heartfield ( )
Funding Body: Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies
Start/End Dates: 01-JAN-98 / 31-MAY-00
Award: €48,000.00

Project: German Media Cultures ( ) Funding Body: Fulbright IIE (US) Start/End Dates: 01-JUN-04 / 01-AUG-04
Award: €8,000.00

Project: Interventions: Activist photomontage and photography in the modern era ( )
Funding Body: ERASMUS
Start/End Dates: 10-JUL-23 / 14-JUL-23
Award: €1,075.00

Project: All Too Human: Rethinking the Neue Sachlichkeit/ Athena Swan Grant ( )
Funding Body:
Start/End Dates: 17-SEP-18 / 06-APR-18
Award: €5,000.00

Project: John Heartfield, Radical Photomontage, and the Crisis of the European Left, 1929-1938 ( )
Funding Body: Mellon Foundation
Start/End Dates: 01-SEP-97 / 30-MAY-97
Award: €24,000.00

Project: German aesthetics and politics ( )
Funding Body: Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Start/End Dates: 01-JUN-96 / 01-AUG-96
Award: €4,000.00

Project: “The Traumatic Memory and Legacy of World War I in the Work of Otto Dix, 1914-1934” ( )
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-OCT-12 / 30-MAY-15
Award:

Project: “The Traumatic Memory and Legacy of World War I in the Work of Otto Dix, 1914-1934” ( )
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-OCT-12 / 30-SEP-15
Award: €65,000.00