Clarissa Chevalier
...(she/her) is an assistant professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Smith College. Her research merges feminist science and technology studies (STS) with contemporary environmental science, examining how scientific imaging technologies, computational models, physical simulations, and sensing systems shape understandings of ocean life, ecological change, and climate futures. Through feminist STS and media analysis, Chevalier traces the material, political, and epistemological conditions that make scientific representations possible, attending to the labor, infrastructures, and situated practices through which environmental knowledge is produced. Her research and teaching are rooted in the conviction that sustained collaboration across the arts, humanities, and sciences expands both the analytical and methodological possibilities of feminist STS. Chevalier is also the associate editor of production and design at Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that supports cutting-edge feminist STS theory.
Smith College
Assistant Professor, Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Smith College
Education
Ph.D., Art History, Theory and Criticism with a Specialization in Interdisciplinary Environmental Research.
Dissertation: “Crafting the Ocean: A Feminist Science and Technology Studies Analysis of Contemporary Oceanographic Imaging across Art and Science.”
Unviersity of California San Diego
M.A., Art History
Savannah College of Art and Design
B.A., Cinema Arts with Minor in Art History
Columbia College Chicago
Claudine Arendt, Through a Porcelain Cast, 2024.
Selected Publications
Clarissa Chevalier and Dante Capone. “Between Tactile and Digital: Zooplankton, Visual Science Studies, and the Automation of Oceanographic Observation.” (forthcoming)
In Visualizing Oceanography: Pacific Collaborations in Art and Science Research. Bloomsbury Press.
Clarissa Chevalier. “Clay as Technical Medium: Claudine Arendt’s Through a Porcelain Cast.” (forthcoming)
In Visualizing Oceanography: Pacific Collaborations in Art and Science Research. Bloomsbury Press.
Clarissa Chevalier. “The Ocean is Not a Machine: A Feminist Media Analysis of Oceanographic Models, Simulations, and Futures.”
In World Futures Review SI: Environmental Futures: Media, Literary, and Narrative Approaches
Clarissa Chevalier. “Embodied Encounters with Plankton: Ground Truth Methods as Sites for Human-Ocean Entanglement.”
Clarissa Chevalier. Book Review: “Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media by Alberlardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka.”
In Relations Beyond Anthropocentrism.Vol 13. No. 2: 43–59.
In Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology. Vol 33. No. 2: 211-214.
Clarissa Chevalier. “Agnes Denes: Ecological Art and Cultural Sustainability.”
Clarissa Chevalier. “Eco-Phenomenology and the Maintenance of Eco Art: Agnes Denes’s A Forest for Australia.”
In The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Vol 21. No. 2: 273-290.
Selected Curatorial Work
Performance Lecture, Drifting with Plankton: An Interactive Performance Lecture on Ocean Art, Science, and Sensory Knowledge, In collaboration with artist Jess Holz. MIT Museum, MIT.
Curator, Embodied Pacific: Through a Porcelain Cast. Geisel Library, UCSD.
Co-Curator with Lisa Cartwright, Embodied Pacific: Seaways. The Visual Arts Gallery at SME, UCSD.
Archival Researcher, SCAD Museum of Art
Savannah College of Art and Design
Selected Public Speaking + Conferences
Presenting Scholar, “Crafting Plankton Data: A Feminist Materialist Reframing of Oceanographic Representations Across Art and Science.” PhD Candidate Colloquium.
Visual Arts Department, UC San Diego, California
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, California
Toronto, Canada
Participating Scholar, Colby Summer Institute in the Environmental Humanities
Colby College, Maine
Presenting Scholar, “Bio-Optical Oceanography, Ocean Simulacrum, and Posthuman Feminism. FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science, and Technology.
University of Windsor, Canada
University of North Texas, Texas
Presenting Scholar, “Pulling Apart the Myth of Independent Scientific Genius with Feminism, Disability Studies, and Artistic Practice.” Society for the Social Studies of Science 2023 Conference.
Honolulu, Hawai’i
San Francisco, California
Invited Speaker, “Ceramics, New Technologies, and Posthuman Feminism.” Design@Large Series: Soft Structures in Hard Times.
Design Lab, UC San Diego, California
Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia
Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Mexico
Evora, Portugal
Brooklyn, New York
Original Courses & Educational Material Development
2026
FYS187: Do Microscopes Have Politics? Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Smith College
2025
VIS103A: Shaping Science through Design. Visual Arts Department, UC San Diego
Educational Materials Developer, The History of Art: A Global View, 1st and 2nd editions. Thames & Hudson.
Selected Awards
Outstanding Graduate Teaching Scholar Award
UC San Diego
Ships Oceanographic Research Fund, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
UC San Diego
Russell Grant, Visual Arts Department
UC San Diego
Faculty of Liberal Arts Outstanding Academic Achievement Award
Savannah College of Art and Design
Harrison Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Research
University of Alabama, Birmingham
Background Image: Jess Holz, Plankton Painting 4/27/24 #88, Halls Pond, chronomicrograph, 2024.