Lucy Whelan is an art historian whose research centres on France in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and addresses questions around artistic self-fashioning, subjectivity, gender, and the environment.
Prior to teaching at the Courtauld, Lucy was an Associate Lecturer at the University of York. She has also spent three years as Research Fellow at Downing College in the University of Cambridge, where she taught in the History of Art Department, and two years as part of the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University in Berlin, funded by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation. Lucy completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2018.
Lucy’s first book, Pierre Bonnard Beyond Vision, was published with Yale University Press in 2022. This examined strategies for deconstructing the presumed authority of the artist’s gaze in figurative art, through exploring questions of embodiment, gender, pictorial time, artistic processes, and the depiction of landscape. She has also published essays in edited books and exhibition catalogues, and articles in journals including The Burlington Magazine and French History. Lucy is currently working on new projects that take ecological and feminist approaches to French art from 1890-1970, including on the sculptor Germaine Richier.
Lucy has previously served for three years on the management committee for the Heong Art Gallery in Cambridge.
