Thadeus Dowad, “Tête-à-tête: Art & Revolution in French-Occupied Egypt”
UIC Art History Colloquium
March 29, 2024
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
106 Henry Hall
Calendar
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How should we understand the significance of the French Revolution in art history after the global turn? Taking up this question from the Revolution’s geographic and chronological margins, this lecture investigates the French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801) as an active site of Revolutionary art-making in the service of colonial rule. It also takes portraiture as its case study, examining the ways French artists adapted the conventions of Revolutionary portraiture to produce a regime-driven vision of a united Franco-Ottoman social order. While occupation-era portraits served the agendas of the French colonial government, they also operated as sites of intersecting French and Ottoman political ideologies and social aspirations. French portraits doubled as seductive spaces for Ottoman actors seeking to further their own liberatory political and personal agendas. By centering the Ottoman conditions of possibility for French portraiture in Egypt, Thadeus Dowad demonstrates that French Revolutionary art belongs as much to the history of Ottoman political modernity as it does to the history of French colonialism.
Thadeus Dowad is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. His research focuses on the art and architectural history of the Ottoman and French empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dowad is particularly interested in the history of French imperialism in the Ottoman Middle East and North Africa, exploring the impacts of capitalism, slavery, revolutionary politics, and empire-building on metropolitan and colonial artistic cultures across the Franco-Ottoman world. His current book project, tentatively titled Empire of Line & Pigment: Art, Ottomans, and the French Occupation of Egypt, is the first comprehensive art and architectural history of the 1798–1801 French occupation of Egypt.
For a Zoom link, please email arthistory@uic.edu.
Date posted
Mar 28, 2024
Date updated
Mar 28, 2024