HEATHER McPHERSON

PROFESSORY OF ART HISTORY
(18th CENTURY-CONTEMPORARY):
MA (maótrise) Université de Paris/Sorbonne, France
Ph.D. University of Washington

Areas of specialization: 18th-20th Century European Art

Professor McPherson has published widely on French art and visual culture in journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth Century Studies, and the Bulletin Marcel Proust, and has authored exhibition catalogues on Gavarni's Images of Women, Portraiture in the Age of Proust, and Marie Laurencin. She received the 2001 Southeastern College Art Conference Award for Excellence in Scholarly Publication for her book, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2001). She was awarded the Frederick W. Conner Prize in the History of Ideas for her exhibition catalogue, Fin-de-Siëcle Faces: Portraiture in the Age of Proust. In 1998 she received the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Arts and Humanities.

Professor McPherson's research focuses in particular on portraiture and issues of representation including the role played by photography. Her current project on Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons examines the intersecting worlds of artist and actor, high art and popular culture in late eighteenth-century London and the origins of the modern celebrity culture. Her essays on Siddons, caricature, and cultural politics have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, the Huntington Library Quarterly, and Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776-1812 (Yale University Press, 2003). Her essay on David's Portrait of Alexandre Lenoir appeared in David after David (Yale University Press, 2007).