Dissertation: Muslim, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American Bodies as European Furnishings, 1500-1700

Advisor: Wolfthal, Diane B.

Dasol Kim investigates in her doctoral dissertation, “Muslim, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American Bodies as European Furnishings, 1500-1700,” the European production and reception of metalwork that depicts non-Christians and non-Europeans. She studies small bronze, swords, candlesticks and lamps, and silver cups made in German-speaking regions and Italy between 1500 and 1700. She questions how such works reflected and constructed the Christian European elites’ conception of depicted groups by being seen, touched, and smelled at courts and burgher houses. Her research also reveals artistic, economic, and political connections across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, which informed the material and iconography of European metalwork. Dasol’s article on a sixteenth-century German candlestick inspired by an Italian engraving in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was published in Das Mittelalterin November 2020. She studied at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2019 through the exchange program supported by her Department.

Passionate about medieval and early modern artifacts, Dasol wrote papers on German church bells, Crusader ampullas, and Islamic inkwells. Her essay on a Persian inkwell in the Hossein Afshar Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which she wrote for the Department's course "Art of the Object," received the Emerging Scholars in Object-Based Learning Award from the Hirsch Library at MFAH and the University of Houston.

Publications

“Domesticating the body of the exotic Other: the multisensory use of a sixteenth-century brass candlestick,” Das Mittelalter, Zeitschrift des Mediävistenverbandes 25, issue 2 (November 2020): 311-337.