Current book project

Post-Imperial Masculinities: Portraiture and the Reconstitution of French Manhood (1815-1848)

 My project investigates the horizon of masculinity in the immediate wake of the Napoleonic Empire. My research shows that the collapse of the Empire caused a rift between the ideal of masculinity and the possibility for its actualization. Against this specter of the Imperial masculine ideal of the recent past, men adopted alternate masculinities and varying modes of gender performance. My study focuses on four portraits as case studies to examine four groups or types of men—the dandy, the Romantic genius, soldiers of the Restoration and July Monarchy, and the bourgeois businessman—who emerged between the years of 1815-1848. My research provides a more nuanced understanding of masculinity than is typically allotted, moving beyond the reductive binary of masculinity as either effeminate or virile and hyper-masculine. 

Forthcoming publication

“Ivan Kramskoi’s Unknown Woman and the Embarrassment of
Modernity.” In What is to be Done: Art Practice, Theory and Criticism in Russia during the
Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Ludmila Piters-Hofmann, Tanja Malycheva, and Isabel Wünsche

The reception of Ivan Kramskoi’s Unknown Woman (1883) typifies popular reaction to the onset of modernity in late nineteenth-century Russia. The subtext of criticism surrounding Unknown Woman, including Kramskoi’s reticence within that discourse, reveals an anxiety or embarrassment surrounding the institutions of modernity that Unknown Woman represents (i.e. theaters, clubs, café-concerts, and especially prostitution). While Russia strove for parity with its Western neighbors in terms of industrial development, it retained a reluctance for Western influence. A similar ambivalence affected Kramskoi’s work that was simultaneously alluring and anxiety-inducing due to the woman’s ambiguous status and perceived sexual independence.