Thesis: Memory, Time and the Muse: An Exploration of Édouard Vuillard’s Representations of Women through a comparison with Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu
Supervisor: Professor David Peters Corbett Advisor: Dr Caroline Levitt
Funded by Courtauld Scholarship (The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust)
The project explores a word-image connection between Édouard Vuillard’s artwork and Marcel Proust’s novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) by focusing on depictions of women. Studying Vuillard and Proust as contemporaries, the analysis compares both accounts of French modernity through their “feminised” verbal and visual language. Images of women in domestic spaces occur through the entirety Vuillard’s oeuvre, while women, central throughout, bookend Proust’s novel. This study pinpoints how Vuillard’s work has been overlooked in modernist contexts because of its overly “feminine” content. Where Proust is considered a key figure of the avant-garde, Vuillard is pushed to the margins of modernism. The study shows how a comparison with Proust can clarify Vuillard’s particular diagnosis of modernity, demonstrating how his artworks connect to broader themes and shed light on the suppressed aspects of modernism, namely domesticity and, by extension, the female space.
Education
2021—: Doctorate of Philosophy in History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
2019—2020: Masters in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
2014—2018: Bachelor of Arts in French with a Year Abroad, King’s College London
Research Grants and Scholarships
2021-24: Courtauld Scholarship (The Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust)
Teaching
2023-2024: Associate Lecturer, The Courtauld Institute of Art: Reality and Fantasy in French Art, 1863-97: From Haussmannisation to Enchanted Ground (BA2 and Graduate Diploma)
2022-2024: Teaching Assistant, The Courtauld Institute of Art: Seminar Sessions (Widening Participation Programme)
2022-2023: Teaching Assistant, The Courtauld Institute of Art: Foundations 2 (BA1 and Graduate Diploma)
2022-2023: Teaching Assistant, The Courtauld Institute of Art: Summer University
Conferences, events and invited talks
Speaker – ‘The Doll’s House: Édouard Vuillard’s Representations of his Sister, Marie (1890- 1893)’, Society for French Studies 65th Annual Conference, University of Stirling, 2024
Co-organiser – ‘Word and Image: Making Connections Across Disciplines and Across Institutions’, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2024
Guest lecturer – ‘Vuillard, Ibsen and the Theatre of Painting’, MA Special Option, Wordplay: Intersections between the verbal and the visual, c.1870 to the present, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2024
Research Interests
- Word and Image relations
- Artists and writers living contemporaneously
- Artists and writers with personal connections
- French Modernism and the Parisian avant-garde
- French literature
- Conditions of women in fin de siècle France
