About

Katherine Tycz is a historian of decorative arts, material culture, and print history. She draws from an interdisciplinary approach exploring the intersections of literary history, material culture, social history, and art history. Her analysis of art, objects, and texts helps to illuminate the practices, beliefs, and daily life of people in the early modern world.

She completed a Ph.D. in Italian at the University of Cambridge.  During her time at Cambridge, she was PhD student on the interdisciplinary research project, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600. The project, which was funded by a European Research Council Synergy Grant, was led by Principal Investigators Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard, and Mary Laven.

From 2023 to 2025, Katherine was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Universal Short Title Catalogue in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. She has also held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Galway based in the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies. She has also been an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a participant in the forum on “Stuff”.

She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Cambridge, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Bard Graduate Center. She has worked in curatorial research and exhibitions positions in museums in both the U.S. and U.K., studying a wide range of art and objects from around the world.