Tuesday Night Lecture Series: Kate Palmer Albers

As part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series (TNLS), Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture by artist Kate Palmer Albers (CAS'08), organized by the MFA Print Media & Photography program and supported by the BU Council for Humanities.

Kate Palmer Albers is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Whittier College. She earned her PhD in Art History from Boston University in 2008. Her most recent book, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph (UC Press, 2021) focuses on the role of ephemerality throughout the history of photography. Emerging from her first book, Uncertain Histories: Accumulation, Inaccessibility, and Doubt in Photography (UC Press, 2015), Albers has ongoing interests in the roles of narrative, biography, and archive in relation to visual art and personal photographs, and the impacts of emerging technologies on art, individuals, and culture.

Her current projects include an archivally-based history of the American writer and curator Nancy Newhall; research on histories of transgender representation in photography; and a study of family photographs. Recent publications include “From Banks to Blanks: The Poetic Spaces of Automated Vision” on Ed Ruscha (Getty Research Institute, 2025); “The thing will be alive”: Nancy Newhall and a vision for photography” in a special issue of History of Photography (2024); essays for Aperture magazine on Uta Barth, James Welling, and Fabiola Menchelli and for exhibition publications on Tarrah Krajank (Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy, 2024) and Alejandro Cartagena (Madrid: Fundacíon MAPFRE, 2026); and a conversation with Jess Dugan in Jess Dugan: Love Pictures (Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2026).

Her online writing project, Circulation/Exchange: Moving Images in Contemporary Art was supported by a 2015 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Albers currently co-directs the Mellon-funded Poet StoryLab: Narrative, Community, and the Transformative Possibilities of Brown Storytelling at Whittier College.

Image: Courtesy of the artist.