Bridget Alsdorf joined the Princeton faculty in 2008. Her research and teaching focus on European art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with an emphasis on art produced in France from the Second Empire to World War I. An associated faculty member in the Department of French & Italian, she also contributes courses to the programs in European Cultural Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Luce Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also worked at a number of museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Alsdorf recently completed a book on the fraught dynamic between individual and group in 19th-century French painting, examining works by Courbet, Manet, Degas, Bazille, Renoir and (most extensively) Fantin-Latour. Solitaries: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in 19th Century French Painting is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in late 2012. Following on this study’s investigation of individualism, collectivity and homosociability in pictorial form, a second book project focuses on representations (across multiple media) of theatrical audiences and crowds in fin-de-siècle France, with particular interest in art’s engagement with emerging fields of social psychology. An article on Félix Vallotton’s crowd scenes and their relationship to his novels is forthcoming, and an essay on the work of Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi is underway. Lastly, Alsdorf is collaborating with Todd Cronan on a translation of philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Écrits sur l’art, under contract with Fordham University Press.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

“Fantin’s Failed Toast to Truth.” The Getty Research Journal, vol. 3 (Jan. 2011).

“Interior Landscapes: Metaphor and Meaning in Cézanne's Late Still Lifes.” Word & Image, vol. 26, no. 4 (Oct. 2010).

“La fraternité des individus: les portraits de groupe de Degas.” 48/14: La revue du Musée d’Orsay, no. 30 (Oct. 2010).

“Femininity and Animality: Portraits of a Lady Exposed.” Andrea Hornick: Recent Work, 1460-1865. New York: David Krut Projects, 2009.

“Pleasure’s Poise: Classicism and Baroque Allegory in Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time.” The Seventeenth Century, vol. 23, no. 2 (Oct. 2008).