People

Tili Boon Cuillé was Salon director for nine years and currently co-convenes the research group with Rebecca Messbarger.  She is affiliated with Comparative Literature, the Humanities, and Performing Arts.  Her interests include eighteenth-century French literature, philosophy and aesthetics with a focus on opera, painting, and the novel, and her current research bridges natural history and the fine arts.  She is the author of Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in French Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto, 2006) and co-editor with Karyna Szmurlo of Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions:  Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts (Bucknell, 2013).

Rebecca Messbarger founded the Salon in 1996 and was Salon director for six years, acquiring the annual budgetary line. She is currently co-convener of the Salon with Tili Boon Cuillé. Her major research interests center on Italian Enlightenment culture, in particular the place and purpose of women in civic, academic and social life, and the intersection of art and science in the production of anatomical wax models during the age. She is author of The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), a finalist for the College Art Association’s 2012 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (University of Toronto Press, 2002), and edited and translated The Contest for Knowledge: Debates Over Women’s Learning in Enlightenment Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2005) with Paula Findlen.

Pannill Camp’s research examines the interactions between philosophy and theatre history in eighteenth-century France. His recently completed manuscript, entitled The First Frame: A Cultural History of Enlightenment Theatre Space, shows that the reform of French theatre architecture in the second half of the eighteenth century brought about a fundamental transformation in the conceptual underpinnings of theatre space. Drawing from empiricist currents in dramatic theory, the burgeoning culture of experimental physics, and the geometry of physical optics, reformist theatre architects dislodged the spatial device of linear perspective that had dominated French scenery since the seventeenth century, thus forging a conception of theatre space that helped define modern mise-en-scène. His second book project, Arts of Brotherhood: French Freemasonry in Performance, 1725-1809, examines eighteenth-century French freemasonry as a cultural tradition steeped in performance practice.

Matt Erlin is the author of Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment In Eighteenth-Century Germany (2004), and the co-editor, together with Lynne Tatlock, of German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation (2005). He has also published articles on variety of topics related to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German culture, from Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophy of history to aesthetic politics in Goethe’s poetry. His current book project, which has been supported by grants by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the NEH, investigates discourses of luxury around 1800 and their relevance for the emergence of new conceptions of literature and aesthetic experience in the period. He is also working on two projects in the digital humanities, applying the practices of “distant reading” and network analysis to the study of genre and to the semantic field of the body in German Romanticism.

Minsoo Kang’s areas of interest include the automaton as a cultural and intellectual symbol in the European imagination; the history of science and technology; literary history – especially the use of science fiction for the study of history, global history – especially East Asian – European contact in the early modern period; and Korean history. In addition to articles in numerous journals he is the author of Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2010) and a co-editor of Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830 – 1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe.

Kristina Kleutghen is an art historian specializing in Chinese art. Her research focuses on the Qing dynasty court (1644-1911), the relationship of Chinese art to imported science and mathematics, and visual and material culture produced in response to European contact. She is currently completing her first book, Imperial Illusions: Crossing Pictorial Boundaries in Eighteenth-Century China (under review), which examines the forgotten monumental illusionistic paintings that European and Chinese artists collaboratively produced for the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795). In 2013-2014, she is on leave as a Getty Research Institute-National Endowment for the Humanities (GRI-NEH) Postdoctoral Fellow for the project “Visions of the West: Rediscovering Eighteenth-Century Chinese Perspective Prints and Viewing Devices.”

Amanda Lee earned her Ph.D. in French at Washington University in St. Louis in December 2014, with a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation was directed by Prof. Tili Boon Cuillé. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, titled The Poetics of Dance in Nineteenth-Century France: Transcribing Movement, Gender and Culture. Her article titled “The Romantic Ballet and the Nineteenth-Century Poetic Imagination” is forthcoming in Dance Chronicle (vol. 39, no. 1, Dance & Literature, Part II, 2016). Her research interests include eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century French literature as well as dance studies, aesthetics, gender, and translation theory.

Nick Miller’s interests include American literature before 1865; the long eighteenth century, African American literature, American studies, Latino/a studies, Romanticism, the history of science, literature and medicine, gender and sexuality, political theory, the Gothic biopolitics, posthumanism and animal studies, and writing.

Yann Robert’s work examines the unique interplay of politics, justice and literature in eighteenth-century France, with a particular focus on the theater and trials of the French Revolution. He is co-editor of L’Ami des lois  (Modern Humanities Research Association, collection “Phoenix,” 2011), and recently published an article titled  “De l’Absorption et de l’identification chez Diderot : illusion et participation du spectateur au dix-huitième siècle,” in La Scène, la salle et la coulisse dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle en France, ed. Pierre Frantz and Thomas Wynn, Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011.

Wolfram Schmidgen’s research focuses on the interplay between literature, law, philosophy, and science. He is the author of Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge UP, 2002), in which he shows how the detailed couplings of persons and things in eighteenth-century descriptions question the limits of identity and community. His second book  Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) explores how early-eighteenth-century Englishmen were becoming increasingly assertive about mixture as the cause of their nation’s virtues and perfections. He is now working on an intellectual history of literary innovation in early eighteenth-century culture.

Stacey Sloboda’s book, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain shall be published by Manchester University Press in 2013. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century art, design, and material culture, particularly in Britain. She has published articles in the Journal of Design History, the British Art Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Studies and recently held fellowships from the Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the American Philosophical Society, and the Yale Center for British Art. She is the co-organizer with Michael Yonan (UM Columbia) of the research project The International Eighteenth Century, sponsored by the Getty Research Institute, and is currently writing about artists and artisans in mid-eighteenth century England for a forthcoming book, St. Martin’s Lane: The Culture of Craft in Hogarth’s England.

Annie Smart’s current research focuses on French literature and the environment.  Her recent publications include “Re-Reading Nature and Otherness in Chateaubriand’s Voyage en Amérique:  A Case for the Biophilia Effect” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 42 (2013), and Citoyennes:  Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France (Delaware, 2011).

Alexander Stefaniak’s research focuses on instrumental virtuosity during the nineteenth-century, particularly on Romantic conceptions of “serious” or “transcendental” virtuosity. Currently, he is at work on a project exploring Robert Schumann’s compositional and critical engagement with the virtuosity craze. More broadly, his interests encompass nineteenth-century music in general and opera from the seventeenth century to the present. He recently presented a paper, “Schumann, Virtuosity, and the Rhetoric of the Sublime” at the 2012 American Musicological Society national meeting, and on November 30, 2012, he presented an article-in-progress to the Salon, based on this research.