Faculty

Marni Kessler Associate Professor Nineteenth-century European Art email

Professor Kessler specializes in nineteenth-century European art and visual culture, and is also interested in art historical theory and methodology, critical theory, fashion studies, and gender and visual representation. In her research, as in her teaching, she combines close visual analysis of objects with social/historical context and a variety of theoretical frameworks. She has published articles and book chapters on Manet, Degas, Caillebotte, Morisot, and Haussmann’s Paris. Kessler’s most recent publication, on the uncanny in Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter, represents her evolving interest in still life painting, food culture, materiality, and the psychoanalytic. 
Her book, Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris, published in December 2006 by the University of Minnesota Press, examines the visual/historical/cultural significance of the veil in late nineteenth-century French visual culture. Kessler is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “Edgar Degas’s Family Album,” that examines the visual construction of family, memory, and trauma in Edgar Degas’s New Orleans paintings.

EDUCATION

Ph.D.                     History of Art, Yale University, December 1996
M.Phil.                   History of Art, Yale University, 1993
M.A.                       History of Art, Yale University, 1991
M.A.                       Art History, Williams College, 1989
A.B.                       English, Vassar College, 1987

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Associate Professor, University of Kansas, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, Fall 2007-present
Assistant Professor, University of Kansas, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, Fall 2000-Spring 2007
Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate Liberal Studies Program, Wesleyan University, Spring 2000
Visiting Lecturer, Yale University, Falls 1998 and 1999
Visiting Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University, Fall 1998-Spring 1999
Visiting Assistant Professor, Barnard College, Fall 1996-Spring 1997
Instructor and Prize Teaching Fellow, Yale University, Fall 1994-Spring 1995

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Book:
Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/K/kessler_sheer.html

Book in progress:
“Edgar Degas’s Family Album: The New Orleans Paintings”

Articles/Book chapters:

“Antoine Vollon: Rendering Butter,” Dix-Neuf: Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes 10 (April 2008) 12-24. http://www.sdn.ac.uk/dixneuf/secure/April08/kessler/Kessler0408.pdf

“Ocular Anxiety and the Pink Tea Cup: Edgar Degas’s Woman with Bandage,” Nineteenth-Century Art WorldWide 5:2 (Fall 2006) unpaginated.
http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn_06/articles/kess.shtml

“Dusting the Surface: the Veil, the Bourgeoise, and the City Grid,” in The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture  in Nineteenth-Century Paris eds. Aruna d’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006) 49-64.

“Filters and Pathologies: Caillebotte and Manet in Haussmann’s Paris,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27:3 (September 2005) 245-268.

“Unmasking Manet’s Morisot,” Art Bulletin LXXXI, No. 3 (September 1999) 473-489. This article was profiled: “Manet’s Veiled Interest,” ArtNews (November 1999) 44.

“Restructuring Relationships: Berthe Morisot's Edma Series,” 12:1, Woman's Art Journal (Spring/Summer 1991) 24-28.

ForthcomingArticles/Essays:

 “Fictional Conceits in Daniel Huntington’s Portrait of Samuel F.B. Morse” in Picturing Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce, Portraiture, and its Uses ed. Karl Kusserow (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2009).

“Photographic Interventions” in Picturing Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce, Portraiture, and its Uses ed. Karl Kusserow (forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2009).

SELECTED HONORS/AWARDS/GRANTS

Hall Center for the Humanities Travel Grant, University of Kansas, 2008-2009
Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the Medical Humanities, New York Academy of Medicine, 2007-2008
James E. Seaver Lecturer, Humanities and Western Civilizations Program, University of Kansas, February 2007
Millard Meiss Book Subvention Grant, College Art Association, for book: Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Outstanding Educator of 2005, University of Kansas Torch Chapter of the Mortar Board Senior Honor Society, Fall 2005
Vice-Provost for Research Book Subvention Award, University of Kansas, for book: Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Wood Fellowship, Philadelphia College of Physicians and Surgeons, 2005-2006
Hall Center for the Humanities Research Grant, University of Kansas, Research Leave, Fall 2005
Byron T. Shutz Award for Excellence in Teaching, Chancellor’s Office, University of Kansas, May 2005
Hall Center for the Humanities Travel Grant, University of Kansas, 2004-2005
Getty Library Research Grant, Getty Foundation, Summer 2003                    
Mentor of the Year, honorable mention, University of Kansas, Spring 2003
Luther Gregg Sullivan Visiting Post-Doctoral Fellow, Wesleyan University, 1999-2000 (2-year fellowship; accepted for 1 year)
Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, 1997-1998
National Endowment for the Humanities, Dissertation Fellowship, 1995-1996
Whitney Humanities Center Graduate Fellowship, Yale University, 1995-1996
Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, Whiting Foundation, 1995-1996, declined
Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies, 1995

COURSES OFFERED

Lecture courses:
Gender and Revolution: European Art 1789-1848
Modernisms: Manet-Cézanne
Survey of Western Art: Renaissance to Present
19th-Century European Art

Seminars:
Women in Visual Culture in Late 19th-Century France (seminar)
Art Histories: Theories and Methods
Manet in Contexts (seminar)
Ingres/Degas: Surface/Text (seminar)
Constructing and Deconstructing 19th-Century Paris (seminar)
The Modern Portrait (seminar)

DISSERTATIONS CHAIRED

Temma Balducci, “Destabilizing Separate Spheres in Early Third Republic French Painting”

Sean Barker, “A Positive Aberrance: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Disreputable Women”

Heather Jensen, “Portraitists à la Plume: Women Art Critics in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France”

Rozanne Stringer, “Hybrid Zones: Representations of Race in Late Nineteenth-Century French Visual Culture”

Debra Thimmesch, “Women, Crime, and Social Deviance  in Fin-de Siècle French Visual Culture"

SELECTED RECENT LECTURES/CONFERENCE PAPERS SINCE 2003

 “The Face of Fashion in Second Empire Paris,” George Washington University Center for Global Humanities, April 2008.

“Antoine Vollon and the Perversion of Butter,” College Art Association, February 2008.

“Making Up in Manet’s Paris and the Ideal Bourgeois Visage,” Fordham University, November 2007.

“Decapitation, the Uncanny, and Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Mobile, AL, October 2007.

“Impressionism and Modernity: Berthe Morisot,” Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, September 2007.

“Excavation and Accretion in Charles Marville’s Paris Photographs,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, April 2007.

“Unmasking Manet’s Morisot,” North Carolina State University, December 2006.

“Regarding the Orient: The Universal Exhibition and the Gendered Gaze,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Bloomington, Indiana, October 2006.

“Ocular Anxiety and the Pink Tea Cup: Edgar Degas’s Woman with Bandage,” Burke Lecture, Art History Department, Indiana University, October 2006.

“Paris in Ruins,” College Art Association, Boston, MA, February 2006.

“Lipstick Traces: Matière as Maquillage in Manet’s Woman Reading,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Austin, TX, October 2005.

“The Screen and the SurFace,” New England Modern Languages Association, Cambridge, MA, April 2005.

“Veils, Dust, and Seduction in Haussmann’s Paris,” Vassar College, February 2005.
“Painting Power:  Mary Cassatt’s Girl Arranging Her Hair,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, St. Louis, MO, October 2004.

“The Pink Tea Cup: Re-Reading Degas’s Woman with Bandage,” Department of French and Italian, George Washington University, April 2, 2004.

“To Know a Veil in Haussmann’s Paris,” Key Note Address, Brigham Young University Art History Graduate Student Symposium, November 2003.

“An Eye on the Evidence: Degas’s Woman with Bandage 1872-3,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Tucson, AZ, October 2003.

“Face to Face: Colonial Encounters at the French Universal Exhibition of 1889,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, London, July 2003.