“No distance should be considered great anymore except the ocean”: Degas in New Orleans on Transatlantic Travel, Trade, and Transport

Dr. Michelle Foa, Art History, Tulane University

Michelle Foa is associate professor of nineteenth-century European art in the Art Department of Tulane University, New Orleans. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press and her second book, Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art, is under advance contract with Yale. It 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, published in The Art Bulletin, was awarded the 2022 NCSA Article Prize.

Her research and teaching have been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, 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 (INHA), among others.
Foa just co-curated the exhibition Edgar Degas: Multi-Media Artist in the Age of Impressionism at the Clark Art Institute, which focuses 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 is co-editing a major special issue of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture titled “Earthbound: Gravity/Bodies/Ground” that will feature the work of 21 scholars (spring/summer 2026). She is also co-organizing an international symposium in Paris in May on materiality and nineteenth-century art that is co-hosted by the Musée d’Orsay, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
She 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 2028. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art and is the organization’s Program Chair. She received the Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, Tulane’s highest teaching award, in 2022.