I wrote a review of Marc Gotlieb, The Deaths of Henri Regnault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) for caa.reviews, which was published in late 2017. When I began reading Gotlieb’s book in late 2016, I was struck by how the book was written during the Obama administration, but would be read during the Trump administration, similar to how Regnault lived during the more liberal Second Empire, but his legacy was shaped by the “moral order” of the Third Republic.
Symbolist transpositions d’art at the Fin de Siècle
I organized and moderated a panel on “Symbolist transpositions d’art at the Fin de Siècle” for the annual Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association Colloquium that took place November 9–11, 2017. Participants included Louis Marvick (University of Nevada, Reno) who spoke on Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Moreau’s shared interest in the figure of Salome, Diana Schiau-Botea (Independent Scholar), who talked about Odilon Redon and Stéphane Mallarmé’s relationship and Jennifer Johnson (St John’s College, University of Oxford), who examined Georges Rouault’s conversations in his work with that of Gustave Moreau and Alfred Jarry. The conference program can be found here.
The late-nineteenth century offered ample opportunity for collaboration and exchange between French poets and artists, whose social circles often overlapped. Whereas at mid-century Parnassian poets sought to recreate the formal effects of painting, all the while staying true to the metrical structure of the Alexandrine, by the end of the century Symbolist poets dispensed with this particular form and any desire for fidelity between source and referent. Instead, the Symbolists created highly subjective compositions distinguished by their suggestive ambiguity, offering a fertile ground for complementary works in other media. A key figure for the scholars participating in this panel is Stéphane Mallarmé, whose collaboration with Édouard Manet on “Le Corbeau” (1875) is an early precedent for the artist-writer exchanges that would flourish during the 1890s, such as Odilon Redon’s lithographs for Mallarmé’s Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897).
At the same time that Symbolism emphasized the importance of the author’s individual voice, it empowered the reader/viewer to take an active role as a maker of meaning. As objects of exchange, transpositions d’art offer evidence of social relationships, including the styling (or norms) that bonded artistic men together. As retellings of another’s creation, they also offer evidence of reader response and, at times, historical distance. This session explored how attention across media to the artistic language of Symbolism can help shed new light on a movement whose means were infamously obscure. While the panel was focused on the fin de siècle, it extended backward towards the mid-century to consider the mutual interests of Mallarmé and Gustave Moreau, and forward into the early-20th to Georges Rouault’s response to the theatrical experiments of Alfred Jarry.
How Big Data can expose a nascent White (House) Nationalism
I wrote a short essay for the London School of Economics US Centre American Politics and Policy Blog shortly after the 2016 election. The essay applies insights from my dissertation on Paul Gauguin to the issue of president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign against civil rights.
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference
I presented my research on Alfred Jarry’s poem “L’Homme à la hache” (1893-4) and Paul Gauguin’s painting L‘Homme à la hache (1891) at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians, held at Edinburgh University in April 2016. Jarry’s poem was published in his artist’s book Les Minutes de sable mémorial (1894) and is one of three poems that he wrote after Gauguin’s paintings. (The Société des Amis d’Alfred Jarry recently issued a true-to-original facsimile as issue 130-1 of their journal L’Étoile-Absinthe.) I participated in the Saturday morning session “Having Words: Artist-writer relationships.”
Technical Art History
I was invited to participate in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Summer Institute in Technical Art History organized by the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts in 2014. The session was dedicated to study of materials and processes used in artist’s books. As I discussed in a post on the workshop’s blog, there are many resources in NYC for folks interested in learning historical techniques first-hand. In my dissertation research on Paul Gauguin, I examine early precursors of the artist book, such as Le Corbeau (1875), a French translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” by Stéphane Mallarmé that was illustrated by Edouard Manet.
Teaching Undergraduate Analytical Writing via Self-Regulation
In 2013, the NEA Foundation awarded our research team a Learning and Leadership Grant for pedagogical research on instructional techniques designed to foster students’ self-regulatory strategies and enhance students’ ability to write analytically. The award was announced by the NEA Foundation on its website and by our union, NYSUT. The grant offers up to $5,000 for educators engaged in group projects, including studies by Higher Ed instructors at public institutions. My fellow co-investigators included Andrea Salis (QCC), Beth Counihan (QCC) and Gloria McNamara (BMCC). We presented our research design at a 2012 Quinnipiac University WAC/WID conference and our results at the annual conference of the Northeast Educational Research Association in 2014.
Women’s Studies
In 2012, I completed my certificate in Women’s Studies from the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. That fall, I was one of several students profiled in the Center’s newsletter.
Duvet to Delacroix: French Prints, 1560-1830
While an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I curated the exhibition Duvet to Delacroix: French Prints, 1560-1830 at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, which took place from June 27 until September 17, 2000. The exhibition focused on original, reproductive and lithographic prints from the museum¹s permanent collection and included Jacques Callot, Jacques Bellange, Claude Lorrain, Robert Nanteuil, Pierre Drevet, Theodore Gericault, and Eugène Delacroix.