BIO

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby specializes in 18th- through early 20th-century French art and visual and material culture, particularly in relation to colonial politics. Her first book, Extremities. Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France, was published by Yale University Press in 2002. She is currently writing a second book entitled Colossal Engineering. (Reconnecting the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower and Panama Canal). Articles stemming from this project include “Geometry / Labor = Volume / Mass?”which appeared in October 106, Fall 2003; and “Out of the Earth. Egypt’s Statue of Liberty” in Mary Roberts and Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, eds., Edges of Empire. Orientalism and Visual Culture, Blackwell Press, 2005.

“Revolutionary Sons, White Fathers and Creole Difference: Guillaume Guillon-Lethière’s Oath of the Ancestors of 1822,” Yale French Studies 101, 2002, was recently reprinted in Jeannene Przyblyski and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Introduction to 19th-century Visual Culture, Routledge Press, 2004. This essay is part of another book-in-progress entitled Creole Looking which examines Franco-Caribbean cultural exchange from the 18th through the early 20th centuries. Other publications include “Nudity à la Grecque in 1799,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 2, June 1998; recently reprinted in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History in the Postmodern Era, University of California Press, 2005.

Grimaldo Grigsby is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 2005; an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship, 2002-3; a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1998-9; and a History of Art Undergraduate Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Art Historical Education, 2003. She has been a member of the editorial board of Representations since Spring 1997. Her recent seminars include Visualizing Labor in 19th-century France; Photography and Empire; France’s Orientalisms; Monuments and Ruins; Delacroix and Ingres; Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution; and Géricault and the Body Politic. Undergraduate lecture courses include Art and Colonialism, the Age of Revolution, the Spectacle of Modernity and the Introductory Survey. She is now focusing on the relationships among media and technologies in 19th-century France, including painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, prints, and engineering design.