109 Pickard Hall Columbia, Missouri 65211-1420   phone: 573-882-6711   fax: 573-884-5269   email: aha@missouri.edu

Mary Salzman

Visiting Assistant Professor 2006-2007
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art
Ph.D., Stanford University

phone: 573-882-6711
fax: 573-884-5269
email: salzmanm@missouri.edu

Teaching

Fall 2006:

• AHA 1105: How to Read Comics
• AHA 3730: 18th-Century European Art
• AHA 4730: Realism through Post-Impressionism

Winter 2007:

• AHA 3740: 19th-Century European Art
• AHA 4005: The Graphic Novel
• AHA 8710: The Contestatory Culture of the Rococo
  (graduate seminar)

Research

My research areas include:   17th- and 18th-century art and aesthetic theory; rococo ornament; the decorative arts and natural history; art and Enlightenment theories of knowledge and subjectivity; the genre scene and its blurring of generic boundaries; tensions between description, the decorative impulse, and narration in the visual arts; text-image relations; the meaning of modernity in relation to the arts in the 17th through 19th centuries; art and irony; the perception of the Western garden through a range of media (prints, photographs, written accounts, bird's-eye views, botanical prints); and urbanism broadly defined (architecture, architectural ornament, the representation of the city in art, illustration, film, comics, and prose fiction). I am developing a second specialty in comics.

My book project treats the concurrent rise of genre scenes of sociability and the flourishing of rococo ornament in France in the 1720s and 1730s as ironic commentary on the fashioning of a modern subjectivity and then traces the reemergence of legible narrative in the genre scene in which factors such as a broader public, the cult of sensibility, and period theories of readership contribute to transforming this imagery into erotic, moralizing, or sentimental narratives, or hybrids of the three. I am particularly interested in tracing the process of change, which is neither neat nor absolute. The book will also be devoted to analyzing the implications of the often-tortured positions propounded in the mid-century art criticism and the writings of Diderot, taking issue with the critics' failure to see irony in both rococo forms and the imagery of polite society.

My research has been supported by a Chateaubriand fellowship and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Publications

"Decoration and Enlightened Spectatorship," in Goodman, Dena and Kathryn Norberg, eds. Furnishing the Eighteenth-Century. London and New York: Routledge (2006)

"Versailles" (with Betsy G. Fryberger), "Stowe," and 28 unsigned catalogue entries, in The Changing Garden (exhibition catalogue). Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003

"The Private Interior as Public Sphere in 18th-Century French Genre Scenes of Sociability," in Brinkhuis, Frank and Sascha Talmor, eds. Memory, History and Critique: European Identity at the Millennium. Utrecht: University for Humanist Studies, 1998 (published on CD-ROM by MIT Press Journals)

Teaching Experience

I have held adjunct positions at the University of San Francisco and in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University. As a teaching assistant at Stanford University, I taught architectural history and film studies, in addition to art history.

Museum Experience

I have worked as both a curatorial assistant and in public relations at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.

The Orrery.
Wright of Derby

The Echo.
Seurat

Reed Richardson (The Fantastic Four) in outer space.
Jack Kirby

Split-page rococo ornamental pattern print.
Lajoüe

The Reading from Molière.
Jean-François de Troy