Katerina Korola is a NOMIS–eikones Fellow at NOMIS–eikones Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and assistant professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities, US).

Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography through an ecological lens. She holds a joint PhD in art history and cinema & media studies from the University of Chicago (US), where her dissertation received the 2022 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Prior to joining eikones, Korola has held fellowships at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Representations, Photographica, Transbordeur, and Feminist Media Histories.

Research Focus

As a NOMIS Fellow, Korola will complete her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells a history of the air — and air pollution — as a photographic problem. Foregrounding the materiality of both the photographic object and the air around it, the book examines how photographic professionals grappled with the smoke, dust and smog of the industrial atmosphere, from the manufacture of photographic materials to the preparation of the final print. An excerpt from this project has appeared in Representations as “The Air of Objectivity: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Photography of Industry” and received the 2023 Emerging Scholars Publication Prize from the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art. Concurrently, she will begin work on a second book project, Heliotropic Media: A Botanical History of Photography, which examines the intertwined histories of botany and photochemistry from the 19th century to the present.

Katerina Korola portrait by Alessandro Frigerio