Nineteenth-Century Caricature: It’s Okay to Laugh

Please join us on Friday, September 29 at 1:30PM ET for the Virtual Salon “Nineteenth-Century Caricature: It’s Okay to Laugh.” This series of online events is cosponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art.

In the past, caricature was of marginal interest to most art historians, but in the wake of visual culture studies it has now attracted a great deal of attention. Join us for a discussion among four scholars who are doing ground-breaking work on caricature in a variety of modes.

Kathryn Desplanque, Moderator, is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a mixed Black multigenerational immigrant who studies the impact of global capitalism’s emergence on the art world. She has published numerous articles on caricature; her first book, Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Art Market in Paris, 1750-1850, is currently under review at the University of Delaware Press.

Douglas Fordham is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia, author of two monographs on British Art, most recently Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019). As a Mellon Indigenous Arts Fellow, he recently worked with UVA PhD students and the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Aboriginal Art to produce an exhibition and catalogue, Boomalli Prints and Paper: Making Space as an Art Collective (2022).

Richard J. Powell, is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History, Duke University. He has published numerous books on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including Going There: Black Visual Satire (2020). He was Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, and has organized numerous art exhibitions. In 2022 he delivered the 71st Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, on “Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect,” currently being revised for a forthcoming book from Princeton University Press.

Allison Stagg, Research Associate, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, has published widely on the subject of historical caricature, articles in Print Quarterly and Imprint: The Journal of American Historical Print Collector’s Society, and, most recently, Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828 (2023). Previously, she was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art History at the Freie Universität of Berlin.