Schwain's pluralistic understanding of American history and interdisciplinary approach to material and visual culture drive her explorations of artifacts and objects that have been overlooked or marginalized in scholarship despite their considerable influence on everyday life. Her first book, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (2008), attends to religion’s significant role in art production and interpretation despite the common assumption that modernization extinguished religious belief. Coedited volumes with scholars from multiple disciplines — Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America (2017) and Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía (2020) — as well as museum exhibitions in a variety of settings consider traditional and fine craft, artist books, photo-journalistic images, and mass-produced objects as meaningful lenses into habits of mind and social practice. More recently, Schwain’s collaborative and cross-generational engagement with specific collections and archives, including the Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney department store’s Missouri: Heart of the Nation collection and the Missouri School of Journalism’s Pictures of the Year International (POYi), are developing into multi-modal public humanities projects. Her work has been supported by (among others) the Smithsonian Institution, the Luce/American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.

Focus Areas

American Material and Visual Culture; Art and Religion; Arts of the African Diaspora; Public Humanities

Teaching

• 2000-level courses:
  • Introduction to American Art and Architecture: The Art of Cultural Encounters (WI)
  • Introduction to Visual Culture: The Long 1960s (WI and RI)
  • Reasonable Devils, Dark Visions (The Early Modern Era) - Honors College Humanities Sequence
  • Diagnosing the Dark (The Modern Era) - Honors College Humanities Sequence
•  3000-level courses:
  • American Art and Culture, 1500-1820 
    • The Presence of the Past in Contemporary Visual Culture
  • American Art and Culture, 1820-1913 
  • American Art and Culture, 1913-Present 
• 4000/7000 level courses:
  • Collecting History, Curating Memory: Pictures of the Year International Archive 
  • Exhibiting “Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble & Resilience in the American South” 
  • 20th Century Documentary Photography: The Glen Serbin Collection (Fall 2017, Fall 2014)
  • Around 1900 
  • Mid-Century Modernism and the “Missouri: Heart of the Nation” Collection 
  • American Photography 
  • Visual Culture of American Religions 
  • American Popular Culture 
• Graduate Seminars:
  • Introduction to Graduate Study: The Cultural Work of Objects 
  • Museum Studies: One Look: Columbia Interprets Cuba’s Ediciones Vigía
  • Museum Studies: Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America
    • Object-Centered Teaching and Learning in Multi-Media 
    • Digital Publishing in Art History: The iCatalog 
    • Designing Exhibitions: Contemporary American Basketry
  • Object-Based Learning in Theory and Practice: The Visual and Material Culture Survey 
  • The Material Culture of Religion 
  • American Modernisms 
  • African American Art Histories
  • Visual Culture

Selected Publications

Books

Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Co-Edited Volumes

Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía, co-edited with Ruth Behar and Juanamaría Cordones-Cook (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020). (link: https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9781683401520)

Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America, co-edited with Jo Stealey (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2017). (link:https://www.schifferbooks.com/rooted-revived-reinvented-basketry-in-america-6276.html )

*Winner of the First Biennial National Basketry Association Book Award

Articles and Book Chapters

“Establishing an African American Eden: Samuel Albert Countee’s World War II Mural for Fort Leonard Wood’s Black Officers’ Club” (work in progress).

”’Vigía es Elegguá:’ Crossing and Dwelling in Barquitos del San Juan (2007)” in Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía, co-edited by Ruth Behar, Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, and Kristin Schwain (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, May 2020), 77-95.

Co-authored with Jo Stealey, “Introduction: The Story of Contemporary American Basketry” in Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America, co-edited by Kristin Schwain and Jo Stealey (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2017), 8-30, 167-172.

"The Bible in Art" in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America, ed. Paul Gutjahr (Oxford University Press, December 2017).

“Creating History, Establishing a Canon: Jacob Lawrence's The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis” in Behold! Representations of Christ and Christianity in African-American Art, eds. James Romaine and Phoebe Wolfskill (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017), 166-177.

“Consuming Christ: Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Biblical Paintings and Nineteenth-Century American Commerce” in ReVisioning: Critical Methods of Seeing Christianity in the History of Art, eds. James Romaine and Linda Stratford (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), 277-293.

“The Scorpio Trail: A Racial Storyscape of Columbia, Missouri,” in Robert Ladislas Derr, Discovering Columbus (2012), 9-11. Located at: https://issuu.com/robertladislasderr/docs/discovering-columbus

“Visual Culture: Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Arts from the Civil War to World War II” in Encyclopedia of Religion in America, eds. Charles H. Libby and Peter W. Williams (SAGE CQ Press, 2010), 2278-2286.

“Visual Culture and American Religions,” Religion Compass 4:3 (May 2010): 190-201.

“Carl Gutherz’s Esoteric Art,” Carl Gutherz: Poetic Vision and Academic Ideals, ed. Marilyn Masler and Marina Pancini (Memphis: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 2009), 57-83.

“F. Holland Day’s The Seven Last Words of Christ and the Religious Roots of American Modernism,” American Art 19: 1 (Spring 2005): 32-59.

Selected Exhibitions

Juan Roberto Diago: Foraged Materials, Assembled Histories and Pointed Questions: Rene Peña’s Everyday Objects, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, April 2024

Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America, co-curated with Jo Stealey, January 2017-December 2019 (http://americanbasketry.missouri.edu/), University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology, Columbia, MO (January-May 2017); 108 Contemporary, Tulsa, OK (June-July 2017); Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi (August–November 2017); Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA (February-May 2018); Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (June-September 2018); South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, SD (October 2018-January 2019); Fuller Craft Museum (May-August 2019); The Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at Florida Institute of Technology (September-December 2019)

Manuel Mendive: Aguas Claras, Aguas Turbias and Eduardo "Choco" Roca Salazar: Portraits of a People, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, February-May 2016 (https://maa.missouri.edu/exhibit/afro-cuban-artists-renaissance)

Sites of Experience: Keith Crown and the New Mexican Landscape, Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, January-May 2013

Public Lectures 

“Placemaking: The Missouri: Heart of the Nation Art Collection," 19th Annual Hancock Symposium, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, September 18-19, 2024. Filmed and posted by Westminster College, https://www.youtube.com/live/LJXW71G64YI?si=AjI_15VaTxxU20jE 

“Canastromania: or How Basket Fever Transformed American Basketry from 1890 to 1940,” Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, Washington, April 2018. Filmed and posted by the National Basketry Association: http://nationalbasketry.org/7959-2/