Teaching.
I am passionate about sharing my expertise in nineteenth-century art and culture. I teach at all levels, from introductory BA to PhD and public engagement, and in all formats, including online and in person, seminar and lecture, and museum-based.
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Public Engagement Lectures
I contribute lectures to public engagement programmes, arts societies, and museum education courses which have included the following themes.
The Nude in the Age of Impressionism
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How did the pressure to paint ‘modern life’ throw the genre of the nude into disarray from the 1860s to the 1890s, and how did artists respond?
Berthe Morisot Then and Now
Tracing Morisot’s perceived place within the impressionist movement through time provides the opportunity to examine the changing priorities of art history and how Morisot’s importance is being framed anew.
The Paris Commune and the Invention of Impressionism
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How can we understand the importance of the 'Terrible Year' of 1870-71 for the artists who would become known as impressionists, as well as for their critics?
Impressionism and its Critics
What were the main concerns of impressionism’s negative critics, and how did satirical accounts and caricatures, while by nature overblown and over the top, express real fears and anxieties?
Impressionism and the Senses
While impressionism is usually understood as a quintessentially visual art, metaphors in which critics compared paint to food betray the visceral reactions that these paintings caused, as well as the gender politics at stake.
Urban, Suburban, Rural: French Impressionism and the Relationship to Place
The Painting of Modern Life, as famously articulated by Baudelaire in 1863, was emphatically urban—but did not remain so for long. This talk explains the importance of the nineteenth-century city to constructions of modernity and modernism, as well as the invention of fashionable suburbs, and why some artists turned away from both.
Impressionism and Labour
Why has the view of impressionism as an art of bourgeois leisure and pleasure been so influential when pictures by Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Caillebotte, and others often focus so emphatically on labour?
Painting Empire in Nineteenth-Century France
Trace the development of the genre called ‘Orientalism’ in France, from early nineteenth-century portraits of Black citizens, through the foreign fantasies of Delacroix and Ingres, the ‘modern life’ painting of Manet and Renoir, and the meticulously detailed North African scenes by Gérôme, among others.
Feminism and the History of Art
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How has Feminism changed the way we understand, experience, and write about art, and what further work remains to be done?
University Modules
At BA, MA, and PhD level, I advise and deliver courses on French art between 1750 and 1920; global impressionisms and the interactions between France and other geographies; the interconnections between art, science, literature, and criticism; and feminist, Marxist, and decolonial methodologies. Recent examples include:
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MA seminar, 10 weeks, 'Impressionism Now', Birkbeck, University of London
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Third-year BA seminar, 20 weeks, 'Impressionist Paris: Modernity and Difference', Birkbeck, University of London
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Third-year BA seminar, 10 weeks, 'Art and Sexual Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century France', University College London, Department of History of Art
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Second-year BA seminar, 5 weeks, 'Art and Society in the Nineteenth-Century', Birkbeck, University of London
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First-year BA lecture, 5 weeks, 'Modern Art and Visual Culture c. 1879-1900', Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford
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First-year BA lecture, 10 weeks, 'Doing Art History', Birkbeck, University of London
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Contributions to MA lecture series, 'Frameworks: Histories and Theories of Art, Architecture, and Photography', Birkbeck, University of London
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Contributions to first-year BA lecture series, 'Art History, A Survey', Birkbeck, University of London