Molly Harrington is a PhD candidate in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish Art. Her dissertation, "Picturing Devotion in Dutch Golden-Age Huiskerken," examines the works of art made for private Catholic worship spaces in the officially Protestant Dutch Republic. Her study emphasizes the role of lay religious women as patrons, creators, and viewers of devotional images, as well as the importance of "low" art or crafts as iconographic and stylistic sources for works of "high" art like paintings. Molly's research has recently been supported by the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Completion Fellowship and a Cosmos Scholars Award from the Cosmos Club Foundation, and she previously held the University of Maryland Museum Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art's department of Northern Baroque Paintings. She received her Master's from the department in 2012, with a thesis on the academic and theoretical underpinnings of history painter Pieter de Grebber's classicizing painting style in mid-17th century Haarlem.
Currently, Molly teaches upper-level art history courses at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, including "Art Wars: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe" and "Magic, Witches, and Superstition in Medieval and Early Modern European Art." Molly has also taught ARTH 201 at UMD for the Freshman Connection program, and online sessions of ARTH 200 and ARTH 201 during UMD's Winter Term. In 2016, she taught two sections of History of Global Architecture and Interiors in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia through a program of the University of New Haven. She has previously served as Graduate Teaching Assistant and Graduate Assistant for Digital Humanities in the Collaboratory.
Outside of the classroom, Molly provided research for the film Vermeer: Beyond Time (Martgage/Soho Moon Pictures, Ltd. and WETA) produced in conjunction with the exhibition Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry at the Musée du Louvre, National Gallery of Ireland, and the National Gallery of Art, for which she also wrote a web feature essay. She spent two years as a Research and Publications Assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, working on the catalogues for Shirin Neshat: Facing History and Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, among others.
