Exhibiting Berthe Morisot after the Advent of Feminist Art History

Feminist art historians reassessed French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a period in which her work coincidentally received steady exposure in major museum exhibitions. This thesis examines how the feminist art historical project intersects with exhibitions that give prominence to Morisot’s work. Critical reviews by Morisot scholars argue that more frequent display of the artist’s work has not correlated to nuanced interpretation. Moreover, prominent feminist scholars and museum theorists maintain that curators virtually exclude their contributions. Attending to these recurrent concerns, this thesis charts shifts in emphases and inquiry in writing centered on Morisot to survey the extent to which curators convey new constructions of her artistic, social, and historical identities. This analysis will observe how distinct exhibition forms—the retrospective, the Impressionism blockbuster, and the gendered “women Impressionists” show—may frame Morisot’s work differently according to their organizing principles

Portraits, Power, and Patronage in the Late Roman Republic

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequence

Portraits as Relic: A Set of Nineteenth-Century Tibetan Lineage Paintings of the Dalai Lamas

This thesis presents a close iconographic and contextual study of a set of seven Tibetan thangka paintings depicting portraits of the First through the Ninth Dalai Lamas, currently in a private collection and dated to the nineteenth-century. Through this case study, I propose to situate the genre of Dalai Lama portraits within the larger context of Tibetan Buddhist practice by considering their role and function in merit-making activities. I propose that as visual reminders of the Dalai Lamas, these portraits can be considered a type of “relic” that is foundational to devotional practices in Buddhism. Specifically, this thesis will investigate portraits of Dalai Lamas within the framework of Buddhist relic traditions. As a secondary focus, the thesis will examine the artistic conventions through which the figures are rendered present, problematizing the notion of “portrait-likeness.

Displaying Lives: the Narrative of Objects in Biographical Exhibitions

Biographical exhibitions are a museum practice that asks for critical consideration. Grounding the argument in critical theory, social studies and museum theory, the article explores the narrative function of objects in biographical exhibitions by addressing the social significance of objects in relation to biography and their relevance when presented into an exhibition display. Central is the concept of objects as ‘biographical relics’ that are culturally fetishized in biographical narratives. This raises questions about biographical reliability and the cultural role that such objects plays in exhibition narratives as bearers of reality and as metonymical icons of the biographical subject. The article considers examples of biographical exhibitions of diverse figures such as Gregor Mendel, Madame de Pompadour and Roland Barthes, and the role that personal items, but also portraits and photographs, play in them

Dickens extra-illustrated: heads and scenes in monthly parts (The Case of Nicholas Nickleby)

As a practice that interleaves extraneous materials within the pages of a book, extra-illustration unbinds the volume form and undermines the autonomy of the literary and of the act of reading. I concentrate on Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) and sets of extra-illustrations by Peter Palette (pseud, for Thomas Onwhyn) and Miss La Creevy (pseud, for Kenny Meadows). Taking advantage of the material and temporal aspects of serialization, these extra-illustrations rearticulate the act of reading in a way that emphasizes the place of Victorian literature in a culture of viewing and collecting

Coaches in the High School Classroom

Explores the choices and challenges faced by six literacy coaches working in Boston and Houston. Includes tools for assessment and analysis of coaching programs

Portraits of Complex Networks

We propose a method for characterizing large complex networks by introducing a new matrix structure, unique for a given network, which encodes structural information; provides useful visualization, even for very large networks; and allows for rigorous statistical comparison between networks. Dynamic processes such as percolation can be visualized using animations. Applications to graph theory are discussed, as are generalizations to weighted networks, real-world network similarity testing, and applicability to the graph isomorphism problem.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure