Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

My book, Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition (2021, University of Chicago Press), explores major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, Auguste Rodin, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky to illuminate a transformation in approaches to body language in European art around 1900.  Combining intensive formal analysis with reception history, inquiries into the logic and language of late nineteenth-century art history, and analyses of period scientific, psychological and philosophical literature, the book demonstrates how new understandings of human consciousness were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses. 

Growing out of my book are several publications that expand its themes and methods. A forthcoming chapter in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Fame series, focused on James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s scrapbook-like text The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), introduces a larger research project on the dynamics of feedback that developed between artmaking and art criticism in the wake of the founding of newspaper clipping agencies in Paris ca. 1880.  Another book project, now in its early phases, explores the aesthetic impact of Darwin’s biological theories––most specifically, his less well-studied theory of sexual selection. Introduced in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) as a second law of nature working independently and at times in opposition to natural selection, sexual selection was devised to account for both the origin of race within the human species and the function of beauty in all living organisms. Taking a wide historical perspective reaching back into the early modern period, the book will examine how the twin theories of natural and sexual selection borrowed from, and recalibrated, three core concepts of European aesthetic philosophy: design, hierarchy, and judgement. 

Alongside academic writing, I also write for wider audiences, and am invested in engaging critically with museum exhibitions that shape the direction of art-historical knowledge and debates in the contemporary public sphere. I am the current field editor for New York City exhibitions at caareviews.org, and regularly publish longform review essays in Artforum on nineteenth-century exhibitions and historically-focused museum shows more generally. Most recently, I published “Men are Dogs,” a cover feature addressing the role of canine imagery in Titian’s poesie, a picture cycle for Philip II depicting mythological rapes. My interest in the questions raised in that article––about how animals were implicated, both practically and imaginatively, in colonial and sexual violence after 1492––is ongoing. 

Between 2013 and 2023, I pursued my scholarly work while sited inside three museums: the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, where I was a resident pre-doctoral fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in 2013/14, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of European Paintings in 2015/16, and the Clark Art Institute, where I was based from 2016-2023. The time I've spent working in such close proximity to collections has made dialogue with curators and conservators fundamental to my intellectual process. I look forward to teaching courses at the Institute that are organized around collections and special exhibitions in New York City and beyond. I believe that entertaining far-reaching and truly interdisciplinary questions, and undertaking direct, slow, continual engagement with material objects, are equally essential to the continued vitality of our discipline.

I received my PhD in 2015 from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, with a Graduate Certificate in Media+Modernity. I grew up in New York City, and am a graduate of Columbia University, where I received my BA in the Department of Art History & Archaeology.