Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021). LINK
This book explores how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences.
Winner, First Book Prize, British Association for Romantic Studies, 2023; Short-listed, Kenshur Prize for best book in eighteenth-century studies, 2023.
Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction (September 2025, University of Chicago Press).
This book charts how various modes of picturing landscape in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century western Europe addressed the emergence of a new and essentially extractive way of treating and conceptualizing the natural world. The regime was characterized by unprecedented efforts to manage, optimize, circulate, and monetize portions of the physical environment across vast colonial and mercantile networks. Developing in the final decades of the eighteenth century, where this book begins, its manifestation in western Europe and its colonies was not uniform. But by the middle of nineteenth century, where this book ends, extraction had become an increasingly hegemonic feature of European industrial modernity. What forms of picturing, I ask, were commensurate with the protocols of extraction? What challenges did this regime pose for not just landscape as a pictorial genre but for a wider range of images that mediated how humans understood the natural world?
What did coal mine ventilation and urban waste infrastructure have to do with nineteenth-century British art? In this article I explore what it meant for artists to work and to think in infrastructural terms, taking John Martin as my example.
This essay examines the role of geological time in the work of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century. It foregrounds the challenges this model of time posed for the relationship between the human and the natural—a relationship usually considered central to Friedrich’s work—and for the perceptual powers of the viewing subject. [Awarded second place for the 2019 Richard Stein Article Prize.]
When critics described Anne‐Louis Girodet's painting of Pygmalion and Galatea at the 1819 Paris Salon as an 'electric' experiment, they were referring to the painting's striking luminous effects. Yet electricity had also acquired political and spectacular valences during the French Revolution, when it articulated a model of radical political and corporeal collectivity. This essay argues that Girodet's paintings bring into focus what it may have meant, in artistic as well as political terms, to represent a ‘galvanized’ body.
Editors: Stephanie O'Rourke and Susannah Blair
With essays by Cabelle Ahn, Katherine Calvin, Alicia Caticha, Milena Natividade da Cruz, Íris Kantor, Marika Knowles, & Christelle Lozère
Mining the many valences of the term "representation," these essays examine the complexities of the construction of race in French visual culture and point toward new opportunities for inquiry and teaching in eighteenth-century art history.
This essay uses the work of the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros as a prompt to reconsider the means by which historical meaning was narrated and disseminated in Napoleonic France, analysing several interrelated pictorial, discursive, and material practices. An essentially cumulative form of historical meaning emerges that can be traced across a range of locations and modalities in Napoleonic France.
Between 1797 and 1804, the French artist Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson produced a series of portraits depicting a young boy, the son of the artist's mentor Benoît-François Trioson. The paintings trace the development of a single child, but they also reference contemporaneous scientific and philosophical discourses that share the series' preoccupation with temporality. By considering the Trioson portraits in relation to these discourses, this article argues that the paintings disclose the durational—or even historical—nature of selfhood at the end of the eighteenth century.
This article examines artworks by Henry Fuseli, William Blake, and Thomas Banks in relation to changing notions of ‘self evidence’ at the turn of the nineteenth century. It considers how models of artistic neoclassicism and scientific experimental procedures shared an investment in the evidentiary authority of an idealized male body. Attending to some of the gendered and racial hierarchies operative in such an ideal, this article also charts its unravelling.
Anne Lafont charts an alternative path through Enlightenment visual culture in France and its colonial networks that aims, in her words, “to establish that which had not been seen, which remained on the margins of [art]works while Africans were then, and from then on, everywhere (12).” The resulting analysis is wide-ranging and plural, drawing together works both well-known and relatively obscure from different discursive and pictorial contexts.
This short article examines mining, mapping, and verticality in eighteenth-century France.
2019 Staring into the Abyss of Time - Friedrich (pdf)
Download2018 Girodet's Galvanized Bodies (pdf)
Download2021 The Sediments of History - Gros (pdf)
Download2019 Histories of the Self - Girodet (pdf)
Download2016 Singular Multiple - MoMA Degas exh. cat. (pdf)
Download2022 Art after Self Evidence (pdf)
DownloadFor a complete list of publications, please see my CV.