Kailani Polzak (Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture) is an art historian who focuses on European visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular attention to histories of science, aesthetic philosophy, race, colonialism, and intercultural contact in Oceania. Her current book project, Difference Over Distance: Visualizing Contact between Europe and Oceania, examines the graphic and printed works created in relation to so-called “Voyages of Discovery” conducted by Britain, France, and Russia in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Hawaiʻi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and traces how these pictures were mobilized in arguments about the origins of human difference in Europe and the United States. Her research and publications also emphasize the methodological questions raised by writing about and curating colonial histories from multiple perspectives.