Ph.D. (Italian Studies, Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies), UC Berkeley
M.A. (Italian Studies), UC Berkeley
M.A. (Art History), UC Davis
B.A. (Art History & Italian Studies, magna cum laude), University of Southern California

Kristen Keach is a scholar of early modern Italy, specializing in the relationship between the literary and visual arts, transcultural and transhistorical reception of verbal and visual objects, and critical issues in the tradition of colonial missionaries seeking the conversion, forced or free, of native subjects in the New World from their own beliefs to those of Christianity. She has published on these and related topics in California Italian Studies and the Newberry Library’s Italian Paleography web-source. Kristen has an article forthcoming with Bibliotheca Dantesca which analyzes the intermedial reliance on Dante Alighieri’s Commedia as the medium of exchange between Robert Rauschenberg’s Inferno drawings and Jasper Johns’ Target paintings. She holds an MA in modern art history from UC Davis and received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Italian Studies Department, with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, in 2022. Kristen has received several fellowships to support her research and writing, including those from Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Mellon foundation, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.