Catherine Doucette

PhD Student


 

Catherine Doucette is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Art and Architectural History and an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow in Caribbean Literatures, Arts, and Cultures at UVA. Working under the guidance of Louis Nelson, Catherine’s research explores the material culture of the early modern Caribbean and Atlantic world during the period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Catherine’s dissertation brings together and considers objects, images, and spaces made in early colonial urban Jamaica during the late seventeenth-century to the early post-emancipation period. In her dissertation project, objects made in early colonial Jamaica–including portraiture, ceramics, silver, tortoiseshell, drums, and townhouses–intervene to amplify ways enslaved and freed people of African descent used material strategies to resist and forge their own identities and conceptions of Blackness in the early modern Atlantic world. During the fall 2023 semester, Catherine was an affiliated researcher in the Department of History and Archeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona in Jamaica. Most recently, Catherine spent time in the UK visiting country houses to identify, document, and study early modern Jamaican and Caribbean objects held at National Trust sites. 

During the 2024-2025 academic year, Catherine is a Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and a Dissertation Fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Her research has been supported by The Paul Mellon Centre, the Silver Society, the English Ceramic Circle, the Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation, and a Dumas Malone Graduate Research Fellowship. Before starting her PhD, Catherine earned her master’s degree in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art. Catherine helps lead The Furniture History Society’s early career development program and she has previously held positions at the Preservation Society of Newport County, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.