Bridget Alsdorf specializes in European art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on art produced in France from the Second Empire to World War I. Her research and teaching combine close looking with an interdisciplinary approach to issues of gender, class, constructions of the self, and the origins of modernism. She has a secondary interest in seventeenth-century French painting.

Alsdorf was educated at Yale University (B.A. summa cum laude 1999) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A. 2003, Ph.D. 2008). She has received fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Luce Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. She has also worked and lectured at several museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Musée du Louvre, and the Musée d’Orsay..

Alsdorf is currently completing a book entitled The Art of Association: Fantin-Latour and the Modern Group Portrait, which examines the resurgence of group portraiture in nineteenth-century France through an analysis of works by Courbet, Manet, Degas, Bazille and (most extensively) Fantin-Latour. Following on this study’s investigation of individualism, collectivity and sociability in pictorial form, a second project focuses on representations of crowds and audiences in fin-de-siècle France. An article on Félix Vallotton’s crowd scenes and their relationship to his novels is forthcoming.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

"Interior Landscapes: Metaphor and Meaning in Cézanne's Late Still Lifes." Forthcoming in Word & Image, 2010.

“Fantin-Latour’s Failed Toast to Truth.” Forthcoming in The Getty Research Journal, 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 23, no. 2 (October 2008): 198-224.

Co-author, The Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z, ed. Nancy Spector (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2001, 2003).