Art Department

Michelle Foa, Assistant Professor, History of Art

Michelle Foa specializes in European art from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century French art and culture. She received her doctorate from Princeton University in 2008, and is currently writing a book on the Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. Professor Foa’s research on Seurat analyzes his body of work as an inquiry into the ways that sensory perception helps us comprehend and navigate the external world, and as an exploration of new ways to evoke these sensory experiences in pictorial form. Her other research and teaching interests are the relationship between art and theories of sensory perception, nineteenth- and twentieth-century art criticism, nineteenth-century French fiction about art, the history of photography, and nineteenth-century exhibition practices. 

  

Recent and forthcoming publications include an essay on Seurat’s seascape series in the catalogue for the exhibition Georges Seurat: Figure in Space, held at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, an essay on Emile Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre in an edited volume on art and music in the nineteenth century, and an article on late nineteenth-century photographic criticism in Britain, among others. 



Before coming to Tulane in 2008, Professor Foa taught at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University.