"Manet’s Syphilis: Debility and Adaptation in the 1880s​"

Although it has long been speculated that Edouard Manet may have suffered from and perhaps even died of complications relating to syphilis, the exact nature of his condition has never been clearly established. This essay uses Manet’s letters and the reminiscences of his contemporaries to reconstruct the progression of the artist’s physical decline beginning in January of 1880. By conducting an analysis which takes into account the ways that Manet physically adapted his artistic practice to his increasing debility and pain, this essay creates a fuller picture of the art and life of one of history’s greatest modern painters. 

"Cultural Bilingualism in 18th-Century Russian Portraiture"

This essay centers on portraits of members of the Golitsyn and Chernyshëv families made over the course of the eighteenth century. As the state implemented a top-down Europeanization of the narrow upper class in this period, portraiture became a key tool in showing one’s ability to conform to the new ideals of Russian citizenship through the adoption of fundamental social graces.  Beneath this surface veneer, however, noblemen and women of the Petrine generation shared an overwrought hybrid cultural identity. It was left to succeeding generations to become truly culturally bilingual by internalizing the mindsets and beliefs that had originally been imposed externally by decree.

"Horizontal Art History: Critiquing Modernist Geographies"

This essay explores the potential that transnational case studies might have for undermining the hierarchical, vertical discourse which has so long characterized the study of Western European Art. Focusing on a single year in artistic production – 1915 – the essay puts in dialogue artworks produced in Russia, France, the Netherlands, and Austria in that year in order to experiment with flattening the hegemony of the “Western” narrative by restoring the authority of a single, unique historical moment.

---