Professor of French
About
My interests cover a broad range of topics in nineteenth-century literature, art, and culture. I have written on the theory of parody, on Decadence, the city, and modernity; I have developed a special interest in the relations between the arts over their histories. In the nineteenth-century context, I have worked extensively on art criticism and art theory, notably Baudelaire's essays on caricature and their place in his theory of modernity, and Delacroix's Journals as an effort to develop a writing proper to painting, to a painter's response to the world. I am particularly interested in poetry.
I published a major new edition, in French and with commentary, of Delacroix's Journals, a project which led me to consider the relations between autobiography and history: how a personal, private diary can be a particular "écriture de l'histoire." Eugène Delacroix. Journal, 2 vols.(Paris, José Corti, 2009).
I recently completed a book (forthcoming) on the relations between the writing of art and the writing of history in nineteenth-century France, focusing on the work of Jules Michelet. I am currently working on early photography in the Mediterranean. I am also translating Delacroix's journals into English.
I am the faculty lead on the University's new Mediterranean studies initiative.
I am the editor of Word & Image.
Recent and Selected Publications
"Horace Vernet’s Orient: Photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839," The Burlington Magazine, CLVIII (April 2016), Part I, 264-271. Part II (June 2016), 430-439
"Practices of Photography: Circulation and Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean," History of Photography 40, 1 (February 2016), 3-27
Eugène Delacroix, Journal, nouvelle édition intégrale établie par Michèle Hannoosh, 2 vols., Paris, José Corti, 2009
"Delacroix and the ends of civilizations," in Delacroix and the Question of Finish, exhibition catalogue, ed. Eik Kahng, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 76-93
"Reading the Trial of the Fleurs du mal," Modern Language Review 106, 2 (April 2011), pp. 374-387
"Peinture et correspondances dans l'oeuvre de Baudelaire," Cahiers de l'Association internationale des études françaises 62 (May 2010), pp.207-221
"Delacroix, ‘J.’ and Still Life with Lobsters," The Burlington Magazine, September 2009
“Imagination esthétique et conscience historique : Jules Michelet et les arts plastiques,” in Romantismes. L’esthétique en acte, ed. Jean-Louis Cabanès (Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2009), pp. 347-357
“Between Ingres, Delacroix and the Pre-Raphaelites: A (No Longer) Anonymous Painter in Italy,” The Burlington Magazine, CL, 1262 (May 2008), pp. 301-311
“Théophile Silvestre’s Histoire des artistes vivants: Art Criticism and Photography,” The Art Bulletin LXXXVIII, 4 (December 2006), pp. 729-755
Baudelaire and Caricature. From the Comic to an Art of Modernity. Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992
Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995
"The Allegorical Artist and the Crises of History: Benjamin, Grandville, Baudelaire." Word and Image X, vol.1 (1994): 38-54
Recent graduate courses taught:
In the Salon of Germaine de Staël: the Invention of Romanticism
Baudelaire
Literature and Photography
Fictions of Fashion in Nineteenth-Century France: Art, Literature, Theory (team-taught course with Prof. Susan Siegfried of the History of Art department)
Restoration France 1815-1830: Romanticism and the Arts
Representing Revolution in Nineteenth-Century France
Walter Benjamin
Figuring the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France (team-taught course with Prof. Susan Siegfried of the History of Art Department)
Poetry and Painting in Nineteenth-Century France
Forms of Autobiography
Recent undergraduate courses taught:
La Bohème
Le Procès: Littérature et art devant la loi
Poésie du XIXe siècle
L’Espagne romantique
Literature on Trial (Romance Languages & Literatures course)
Révolution, Restauration, Romantisme
Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle
Réalisme et idéalisme dans le roman français du XIXe siècle
Research Areas(s)
- Nineteenth-century French literature, art, and society
- art criticism, relations between the arts
- the city, Walter Benjamin, the history of modernity
- the representation of history
- parody
- comparative literature
- the Mediterranean
