Kelli Wood is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and curator whose work combines methods from fields such as art history, art criticism, game studies, sports science, and museology. In 2019, she joined the School of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as an assistant professor of art history and museum & curatorial studies. Wood received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2016 for her dissertation on the early modern visual and material culture of games and sports. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships including a Fulbright, a Kress fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., a three-year postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Her academic projects, from 2016 through 2021, have and will focus on the relationship between art, games, and sports as mimetic representations from the sixteenth century onward. Her first book, The Art of Play in Early Modern Italy, is under contract with Amsterdam University Press in their series Cultures of Play: 1300-1700. Wood’s intellectual interests extend forward from the early modern period. Recent writings have taken a longue durée approach to sports and games, including topics that span from the early development of European football and printed board games to the rise of Victorian board games, 8-bit video games, and the influence of Title IX on women’s athletics. She has scholarly articles forthcoming on the early history of printed playing cards and a historiographic investigation of the influence of ancient athletics on the development of museology and art history in the 19th century. From 2020 through 2024, Wood’s new early modern projects turn toward sixteenth and seventeenth-century Goa, India as a port city. Archival research, field work, and invited talks in 2020 have explored the facture and circulation of shell craft in the Indian ocean and material culture trade with Europe and South Asia. Upcoming talks consider Goan Baroque architectural, urban, and garden spaces as loci of performance, play, and use of material culture.

Curatorial work, art writing, and digital humanities are central to Wood’s research methods and production. In 2018, she began guest-curating a permanent wing of the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, A Global History of Sport, opening in anticipation of the 2022 World Cup. In January 2021, Wood was appointed Regional Editor for the Southeast for The New Art Examiner journal and commissions and writes essays exhibition reviews. In 2021, Wood was awarded a 12-month NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication and will produce a browser-based platform and playable digital versions of historical board games.

Wood offers both introductory and special topics courses at the UT including Survey of Western Art II, Art of Italy 1250-1450, Art of Italy 1450-1600, Northern European Art 1350-1600, Global Baroque Art and Architecture, History of Museums and Collections, The Visual History of Sports and Games, and Video Game Art. Currently Wood serves on the Steering Committee for the Marco Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Steering Committee for the UT Humanities Center. She is a member of the Italian Art Society, the International Council of Museums, the College Art Association, and the North American Society for Sport History.

Publications

Articles and Chapters

• Chancing it: print, play, and gambling games at the end of the sixteenth century” Art History, Volume 42, Issue 3, June 2019
• “Art and technology:  archiving video games for research in university libraries” ArLis: Art Libraries journal, Volume 43, Issue 4, Oct. 2018 
• “Balls on walls, feet on streets: Subversive Play in Grand Ducal Florence”  Renaissance Studies, Volume 32, Issue 3, June 2018
• “A History of Play in Print: Board Games from the Renaissance to Milton Bradley” Center for Gaming Research Occasional Papers Series, Volume 44, Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas, Sept. 2018 
• “Performing Pictures: Parlor Games and Visual Engagement in Ascanio de’ Mori’s Giuoco piacevole” Playthings in Early Modernity, Kalamazoo, MI: MIP of Western Michigan University, 2017

Essays

• “In Tennessee, Art itself is Protest” The New Art Examiner, Volume 34, Oct. 2020 (3000+ words)
• “Display Mode: Exhibiting Video Games as Art, History”  The New Art Examiner, Volume 34, No. 2, Nov/Dec 2019 (3000+ words)

Reviews

• “Nashville’s Art Compels Recognition” New Art Examiner Volume 34, No. 3, Jan/Feb 2020
• Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, September 8, 2018–February 24, 2019. www.caareviews.org/reviews/3506