Kathryn Brush

Brush attended McMaster University while majoring in modern languages and literature. She spent two years studying in Canada before spending her third year in Europe at the University of Poitiers and the University of Göttingen. Following this, she changed her major to Art History and German for her Bachelor of Arts at McMaster University and subsequently earned her MA and PhD in Art History at Brown University.[1] Her PhD dissertation from Brown University was titled The West Choir Screen at Mainz Cathedral: Studies in Program, Patronage and Meaning.[2]

After graduating from Brown University, Brush became one of the first women to be hired for a full-time position in Art History at the University of Western Ontario in 1987.[3][4] She earned visitng fellowship appointments at Princeton University, Harvard University, and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.[5] In 2004, she published Vastly more than brick and mortar: reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s through Yale University Press, a book which described, in detail, the history of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.[6]

In 2010, Brush was a curator for a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded exhibition titled "Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier". The exhibition focused on the impact European men and women settlers had on Upper Canada.[7][8]

In 2013, Brush was awarded the university's Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching[9] and was a candidate as a councillor of the Medieval Academy of America.[10] Two years later, Brush was one of three professors from the University of Western Ontario named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and thus became the first visual arts professor from the university to ever be elected.[11] In 2017, she was named a Distinguished University Professor of art history[1] and awarded the 2017 Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research.[12] The following year she collaborated with Joanne Bloom to curate an exhibit at Harvard University Fine Arts Library called "Camera Woman Along the Medieval Pilgrimage Roads" which focused on early 20th-c photographer Lucy Wallace Porter (1876–1962).[13]

Her husband John Shearman was a scholar of Italian Renaissance and a retired faculty member at Harvard University.[14]

The following is a list of publications:[15]

• The shaping of art history: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the study of medieval art (1996)
• Vastly more than brick and mortar: reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s (2004)
• Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier (2010)