Caroline LaPorte-Burns is a doctoral candidate specializing in early modern art history under the supervision of Dr. Angela Vanhaelen. Her dissertation examines the relationship between violence and the market for ornament in its survey of the Dutch pearl trade. She studies the burgeoning economic and social relationship between humans and the ocean to consider an aesthetics of the sea, where bodies of water are reimagined as social spaces and galleries of both resource accumulation and human and environmental loss.
Prior to entering the PhD program in 2020, Caroline received a BA in Art History and German from Barnard College of Columbia University, and an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, where she worked with Dr. Joanna Woodall.
Her research has been supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture, the Historians of Netherlandish Art (HNA), and the Max Stern Museum Fellowship. She is the 2023-2024 recipient of the Fred and Betty Price Faculty of Arts Research Award. As a recipient of the Price Award, she serves as Curatorial Research Fellow in the collection of European Art (before 1800) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
caroline.laporte-burns [at] mail.mcgill.ca