W.R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History and Department Chairmsheriff@earthlink.net
My research focuses on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century French art and
culture, and I am especially interested in issues of creativity,
sexuality, gender, and, most recently, travel and cultural exchange. My
aim is to give the art works I interpret a place in both the past and
present; I try to elucidate and respect the historical specificity of
the past, while interrogating its visual culture through current
interpretative practices. I have developed this approach in three
books, all published by the University of Chicago Press:
J.-H. Fragonard: Art and Eroticism (1990);
The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (1996) and
Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (2004). My
latest projects are a specific study,
From Cythera to Tahiti: French Art and the Enchanted Island, and a more general analysis of the period,
Travels in Eighteenth-Century Art,
which rewrites the history of art through the movements of people and
commodities across Europe and between Europe and American, Africa, and
Asia. I am currently editing
Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art 1500-1930 for the University of North Carolina Press.
Although some of my graduate seminars explore only the eighteenth
century, many are organized thematically, with students working on
topics between 1700 and the present. Recent seminars have been "Death
Becomes Her," "Islands," "The Epic Hero in Love." For undergraduates, I
teach an intermediate level course on eighteenth-century art; a
language-across-the curriculum course, "Representing Paris 1800- present." I also teach a
first-year seminar
on representing nature that examines the "cabinet of wonders" from
medieval treasuries to David Wilson's postmodern Museum of Jurassic
Technology. Several of my topics courses have organized exhibitions at
the Ackland Art Museum: a first-year seminar created
Seasons of Paris and a graduate seminar,
Reason and Fantasy in an Age of Enlightenment.
Last modified
09/07/2007 07:51am.
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