Michelle Foa

Michelle Foa is an Associate Professor
of European art from the 18th through the early 20th centuries in the
Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, with a particular focus on
19th-century French art, visual and material culture, and criticism. 
Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was
published in 2015 by Yale University Press.  Professor Foa situates
Seurat’s body of work as a sustained meditation on different forms of
visual engagement with the outside world and the diverse states of mind
that these visual experiences can elicit.  She places particular
emphasis on Seurat’s investigation into the relationship between vision
and knowledge, interpreting his work in close relation to 19th-century
scientific discourses on the operation of the senses and their role in
how we come to understand the world.  In addition to her work on Seurat,
Professor Foa has published numerous essays on 19th- and 20th-century
painting, photography, art criticism, and literature, and she has
lectured domestically and internationally on her research.

Professor
Foa’s current book project focuses on the diverse body of work of Edgar
Degas, which she interprets as a reflection of the artist’s profound
and long-standing interest in materiality.  Her other research and
teaching interests include Europe’s global encounters in the 18th and
19th centuries, the materials of art, the relationship between art and
science, and art historiography and criticism. 

Professor Foa
completed her doctorate at Princeton University in 2008, the same year
that she began teaching at Tulane.  She has also taught at Mount Holyoke
College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton.

She is
currently the William L. Duren ’26 Professor at Tulane and a Monroe
Research Fellow at Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South.