Michelle Foa

Michelle Foa is associate professor of European Art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on nineteenth-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. Her second book, Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art, which is under contract with Yale Press, analyzes the significance of Degas’s experimental methods of making and positions his body of work as an evocation of the materiality and heft of the world around him. Part of this research, an article published in The Art Bulletin titled “In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old,”was awarded the 2022 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize. Her research on Degas has also been published or is forthcoming in Art History and West 86^th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, among other journals, as well as in exhibition catalogues.

Another major research project explores the network of global developments that reshaped the making and consumption of paper over the course of the nineteenth century and the impact of these developments on artistic and cultural production.

Professor Foa’s research and teaching have been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, where she was a Florence Gould Foundation Fellow, and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art/The National Institute of Art History in Paris, among others.

Professor Foa co-curated the exhibition Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism at the Clark Art Institute, which focused on the artist’s innovative use of a wide range of materials and techniques and his complicated relationship to Impressionism (July 13-October 6, 2024).

She co-organized an international conference in Paris in May 2025, “New Meaning in the Matter of 19th-Century Art,” which was co-sponsored by Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and held at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art. She also co-organized an international symposium on 19^th-century paper at the American University of Paris in June 2025. She is currently co-organizing a major conference at the Barnes Foundation that will take place in the spring of 2026 in conjunction with the country’s bisesquicentennial.

She is the co-editor with Carol Armstrong of a special issue of West 86^th titled “Earthbound: Gravity/Figure/Ground” that will feature the work of 20 scholars and will be published in 2026.

Professor Foa is Vice President of the National Committee for the History of Art and on the organizing committee for the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) quadrennial conference in 2029. She also serves on the editorial board of The Art Bulletin and on the board of directors of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, for which she is Programs Chair and organizes regular virtual scholarly programming.

She has been a member of the faculty advisory committee of the Environmental Studies program at Tulane for several years and also serves on its Executive Committee. She played a leading role in initiating the establishment of the university’s first environmental humanities program.

In 2022, she received the Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, the university’s highest teaching award.

She completed her doctorate at Princeton University and taught at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton while a graduate student before coming to Tulane.

Select publications:

Book:

Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, (Yale University Press, 2015).

Select Articles:

“Degas, on the Ground,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (forthcoming in spring/summer 2026).

“Edgar Degas’s Dust,” Art History 48, no. 2 (June 2025).

“Degas on French Textiles, the Transatlantic Cotton Trade, and the Work of Ironing,” in Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism in Late 19th-Century Paris exhibition catalogue, Cleveland Museum of Art (Yale University Press, 2023).

“In Transit: Edgar Degas and the Matter of Cotton, between New World and Old,” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 3 (September 2020). Awarded the 2022 Article Prize by the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

“The Making of Degas: Duranty, Technology, and the Meaning of Materials,” special issue of nonsite on nineteenth-century art, edited by Bridget Alsdorf and Marnin Young (February 2019).

“‘One Art Eating the Other’ in Emile Zola’s L’Oeuvre,” in Art and Music as Rival Sisters at the Birth of Modernism, 1800-1900. Aldershot, U.K. and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2014.

“(Anti) Biography and Neo-Impressionism,” RIHA: Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, special issue on Neo-Impressionism, July 2012.

“Textual Inhibitions: Photographic Criticism in Late Victorian Britain,” History of Photography, February 2012.

“On the Spaces of Painting and Perception: Seurat and Helmholtz” in Georges Seurat: Figure in Space, exhibition catalogue for the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, ed. Christoph Becker, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009. Catalogue published in English, French, and German editions.