“Towards an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenology of Whiteness: Madame du Barry, Zamor, and the Racial Politics of Marble”

Alicia Caticha (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European sculpture and decorative arts with a particular focus on issues of materiality, colonialism, and popular culture. Her current research takes up the racialization of the white marble ideal through the lens of its material and aesthetic relationship with the "foreign" commodities of porcelain and sugar. She has published on this topic and the decorative arts, more broadly, in Art History, Journal18, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and The French Porcelain Society Journal. Caticha's research has been supported by the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Newberry Library. She is currently a fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

The talk will take place in room A266 Bay 10 on the second floor of Smith Warehouse and is free and open to the public.