Allison E. Deutsch, PhD
Research
I am a scholar of nineteenth-century art, its colonial contexts, and its sexual politics.
My current research addresses a colonial imaginary through which many nineteenth-century writers expressed anxiety about French impressionism.
French impressionism has been associated with a particular vision of white middle-class life in and around Paris that avoids references to the wider world. And yet, anxieties about racial and cultural alterity were heavily embedded in its reception. The issues at stake for critics—of colour and legibility, training and tradition, centres and margins—were framed in the context of population shifts, immigration, and imperialism. As supporters struggled to claim the movement as commensurate with French values and taste, or when derogatory commentators ejected impressionism from any such arenas, they drew on categories, methods, and metaphors from debates about human diversity and expansion.
I am also currently publishing in the areas of French art, literature, and the Paris Commune; the multi-sensory reception of art; and the sexual politics of paintings of food and dining.
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I am a founding member of the Impressionist Futures Group.
Education
I graduated from Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA, with a BA in Art History in 2011, and completed my PhD in History of Art under the supervision of Professor Tamar Garb at University College London in 2016.
Employment
I joined the Birkbeck Department of History of Art, now School of Historical Studies, in 2020 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, and I joined the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Oxford in 2023. Prior to this, I held positions as Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London; Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art; and Teaching Fellow at University College London.