Kristen Galvin, Ph.D.

Dr. Kristen Galvin’s interdisciplinary research and teaching examine late 20th- and 21st-century visual cultural economies primarily in the United States, with a focus on the intersections of digital media, television, film, contemporary art, performance, gender and sexuality, memory, popular music, and subcultural studies. In her work, she also advances the public humanities, doctoral education reform, and fair labor practices in higher education. Her current book project explores a new wave of “hypernostalgia” in 21st-century streaming television, examining how the platform attention wars and culture wars intersect to shape American identity, collective memory, and popular culture in an era of intensifying political polarization.

• Ph.D. in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
• M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Criticism and Theory, Purchase College, SUNY
• M.F.A. in Visual Arts, Purchase College, SUNY
• B.A. in Visual Art with Honors, Brown University, RI

Lower Division

• AH 1001: Global Visual Culture: 1300 to Present
• AH 1500 Art and Ideas

Upper Division

• AH 3000/VAPA 3000: Digital Cultures
• AH 3260/WEST 3260: Women, Visual Arts, and Culture II
• AH 3850/VAPA 3000: Topics in American Art and Visual Culture: The 1980s
• AH 3860: Contemporary Art
• AH 3980: Art History: Theories and Methods
• AH 4980/FILM 4980: Senior Capstone
• AH 4030: Internship in Art History
• AH 9400: Independent Study in Art History

• “Artsy Fartsy: Pecker and the Guilty Pleasures of John Waters’ ‘Bad’ Art Habits,” in Refocus: The Films of John Waters, eds. Brian Brems and Michelle E. Moore. Edinburgh University Press, September 2025: 63–80.
• “Cobra Kai Never Dies’: Reframing Masculinities in the Karate Kid’s Nostalgic Transgenerational Reboot,” in The ’80s Resurrected: Essays on the Decade in Popular Culture Then and Now, ed. Randy Laist. McFarland, 2023: 79–92.
  The ’80s Resurrected: Essays on the Decade in Popular Culture Then and Now, ed. Randy Laist. McFarland, 2023: 79–92.
• “Beyond the Beginnings of Ends: Quit Lit’s Critique of the Academic-Industrial Complex and its Legacy,” in A Quit Lit Reader, ed. Chris Flanagan et al. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2022: 175–192.
• “Case Study 2: Virtual Public Humanities Internships (2020–),” in the chapter, “A Space and A Place in Graduate Education,” in A Practitioner’s Guide to Supporting Graduate and Professional Students, eds. Valerie Shepard and April Perry. New York: Routledge, 2022: 181–184.
• “Tracking Hypernostalgia: Soundtrack Albums and the Return of the Cassette in American Film and Television,” in The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media, eds. Laurel Westrup and Paul Reinsch. New York: Routledge, 2020: 190–208.
• “Those Were the Days’: The Live Televisual Revival of the Musical and Retro Family Sitcom in the Post- Network Era.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. 9.2 (2020): 231–246.
• “The Nova Convention: Celebrating the Burroughs of Downtown New York,” in William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century, eds. Alex Wermer-Colan and Joan Hawkins. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2019: 80–96.
• Spiker, Christina M., and Kristen Galvin. “The Cost of Precarity: Contingent Academic Labor in the Gig Economy.” Art Journal Open. 1 May 2019.