Professional Summary
I am an art and design historian interested in global visual cultures, philosophies, and questions about the future. I build detailed, historically grounded accounts of how people have made and understood images across time.
One central thread in my research is the relationship between people and the wider world they live in, including animals, plants, and environments, and what those connections reveal about art and about existence. I'm also interested in how minds, both human and nonhuman, take in and organize information, especially visually, and what that can tell us about culture and knowledge.
I specialize in the art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular depth in Symbolism, Decadence, the Aesthetic Movement, and occult visual culture. What draws these movements together is a shared impulse: a turning away from the cold rationalism of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, and toward mystery, inner experience, and forms of knowledge that resist tidy explanation, from Rosicrucian mysticism to Theosophy. I'm fascinated by how these artists reached toward the unknown as a way of pushing back against the dehumanizing forces of their age.
That same impulse runs through the art of our own moment, where artists are once again responding to vast, impersonal systems, whether algorithmic image-making, artificial intelligence, or the sameness of mass production, by insisting on the strange, the handmade, and the things a system can't reproduce.
The framework I use to explore all of this is philosophical posthumanism, which questions our basic assumptions about what it means to be human. It leads to a question I keep returning to: how might nonhuman beings, whether animals, plants, or artificial intelligence, see and experience the world, and what would that mean for how we think about art? My doctoral dissertation, "The Well-Tempered Android: Philosophical Posthumanism in Science Fiction Cinema," pursues these ideas through science fiction film.
Teaching is central to everything I do. I'm especially committed to finding fresh, effective ways to teach art and design history across the humanities, in both introductory courses and those designed for majors. I keep a close eye on the ongoing debates about artificial intelligence in higher education, both as a teaching tool and as a force reshaping how knowledge itself gets made.
Education
MA: Indiana University Bloomington | Bloomington, Indiana, 2013 (Art History)
PhD: University of Louisville | Louisville, Kentucky, 2023 (Humanities: Studies in Culture, Criticism & Contemporary Thought)
Certificate: University of Cambridge | Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2010 (Art History Summer School Program)
BA: University of Louisville | Louisville, Kentucky, 2011 (Triple Majors in Art History, English & Humanities)
Positions and Work Experience
08-2024 -05-2025 Lecturer at the Hite Institute of Art and Design, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY
08-2024 -10-2024 First-Year Experience Lecturer for the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY
08-2022 -12-2023 First-Year Experience Lecturer for the Honors Program, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY
08-2021 -05-2025 Art History & Humanities Lecturer, Central Texas College (Continental Campus), Ft. Knox, KY
01-2021 -05-2021 Art History Lecturer, Ivy Tech Community College, Sellersburg, IN
08-2019 -05-2020 Art History & Humanities Lecturer, Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, IA
08-2015 -05-2018 Humanities Lecturer, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY
08-2025 -To Present Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Cincinnati Blue Ash, Blue Ash, Ohio
Presentations
Paper Presentations
Cody Gault (02-2026. ) The Sound Machine, Annihilation & Anesthetized Venus Flytraps: Sentience and Sapience in Plants .Poetry Responds to the Climate Crisis Panel at the 53rd University of Louisville, KY Conference on Literature and Cultures Since 1900.
Contact Information
cody.gault@uc.edu