Michelle Foa

Florence Gould Foundation Fellow

01/28/2024–06/02/2024

Michelle Foa is associate professor of art history at Tulane University, where she focuses primarily on nineteenth-century European art and visual and material culture. Her current research interests include the history and ecology of artists’ materials; the relationships between art, science, and technology; the history of conservation; and the intersections of art history and environmental studies. At the Clark she will work on two book projects: The Matter of Edgar Degas and The Making and Unmaking of Nineteenth-Century Paper. The former analyzes the conceptual complexity of the artist’s material and technical experimentation and his various strategies for evoking the materiality and heft of the world around him in pictorial form. The latter draws out the network of global developments that dramatically reshaped the production and consumption of paper over the course of the nineteenth century and explores the impact of these developments on artistic and cultural production of the period.