Michelle Foa is Associate Professor of European art of the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries in the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane, with a particular focus on nineteenth-century French art, visual and material culture, and criticism. She is currently at work on a book on Edgar Degas titled The Matter of Degas, and an article drawn from this research published in The Art Bulletin was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association’s Article Prize in 2021.

Another current research project explores the network of global developments that reshaped the making and consumption of paper over the course of the nineteenth century. Other research and teaching interests include the materials of art, the relationships between art, science, and technology, the intersections of art history and environmental studies, and art historiography and criticism. She is on the faculty advisory committee of the Environmental Studies Program at Tulane and is the co-recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a new Environmental Humanities minor.

She worked on this project at A Studio in the Woods.

Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano