Professional Summary
I am an art and design historian at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash. My teaching and research cover global visual cultures, the history of ideas, and the question of what counts as a mind, which has become a lot harder to avoid in the last few years.
I specialize in the art of roughly 1850 to 1920, with particular depth in Symbolism, Decadence, the Aesthetic Movement, and occult visual culture. What draws these movements together is a turn away from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and toward mystery, inner experience, and forms of knowledge that resist tidy explanation, from Rosicrucian mysticism to Theosophy.
I read that turn as a response to the vast, impersonal systems of the period, and I think artists today are under similar pressure. Some respond to algorithmic image-making and mass production by insisting on the strange, the handmade, and the things a system cannot reproduce. Others have taken up artificial intelligence as a medium or collaborator. I am interested in both, and I suspect the Decadents would have been too, given how much they preferred artifice to nature.
The framework I use to explore all of this is philosophical posthumanism, which questions our basic assumptions about what it means to be human. The question I keep coming back to is how nonhuman beings, whether animals, plants, or machines, might perceive and experience the world, and what that would mean for art, which we have long treated as uniquely ours.
My doctoral dissertation, "The Well-Tempered Android: Philosophical Posthumanism in Science Fiction Cinema" (University of Louisville, 2023), pursued these ideas through film. I am now reworking it into a book for general readers on likeness, moral standing, and artificial intelligence. It uses science fiction cinema as evidence and approaches the subject as an art historian would, asking why we are so quick to credit a mind to anything with a familiar face and so slow to credit one to anything without it.
Teaching is central to everything I do. I teach art history surveys for general education students, along with design history and the history of visual communication for majors. Most of my students are in their first two years of college, so I put a lot of work into explaining difficult ideas in plain language. I try to build courses that are global in structure, as opposed to Western with a few additions.
In my visual communication course, for example, the history of print begins with Cai Lun and Bi Sheng in China and gets to Gutenberg by way of Samarkand and Baghdad, and in my survey the Baroque unit spends as much time in Quito and Mexico City as in Rome. I also like to teach art and popular culture together, so a contemporary art course might cover a biennial one week and Bob Ross or HGTV the next.
Recent and forthcoming courses include "Life, Leaves, and Learning Machines," an honors seminar on intelligence, consciousness, and nonhuman life, and a contemporary art survey organized around whether art is a uniquely human activity. I also keep a close eye on the 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