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Aruna D'Souza,
Assistant Professor of Art History;
Ph.D. New York University.
Publications
Courses Taught
Dissertations
and Theses
Supervised
E-mail: adsouza@binghamton.edu
Office: Fine Arts 319
Phone: (607) 777-2701
Office Hours: On leave until September 2009
Specialization: Late 19th and early 20th century European art and visual culture; feminist art, theory, and criticism; theories of artistic biography and its use within art historical discourse; gender and urban space, including gendered divisions of public and private, and their manifestations within visual and architectural culture; new forms of intimacy and belonging in late 19th century urban culture in France; contemporary art; postcolonial theory and critiques of globalization.
Aruna D’Souza received her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. After having taught at Bard College and Purchase College, SUNY (where she served as director of the MA Program in Art History, Theory and Criticism of 20th Century Art), she joined the faculty at Binghamton University in 2004.
Professor D’Souza’s teaching and research covers a wide range of interests, including late-19th century French painting, early 20th century European modernism, as well as contemporary art on a global stage. Her recent book, Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint (Penn State University Press, 2007), is both an analysis of Cézanne’s images of male and female nudes and a reflection on the possible uses of “the life of the artist” as an art historical tool in the wake of poststructuralist critiques of biographical interpretation. Concurrently, other aspects of her research have focused on issues of gender and public, urban experience in the late 19th century (and the traces of these discourses in contemporary art). She has co-edited a volume (with Tom McDonough) titled The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space and Visual Culture in late 19th Century France (Manchester University Press, 2006), to which she contributed an essay asking “Why the Impressionists Never Painted the Department Store,” concluding that the visual horizon of Impressionist painting – like that of the flâneur – excluded the experience of shopping, which was an activity coded as “feminine” in the cultural imagination of the time. Her current project, Open Secrets: Intimacy between Street and Home in Late 19th Century Paris, examines the changing forms of intimate relationships in the tumultuous 1890s, a period during which political upheaval, demands for women’s rights, economic instability and cultural anxieties were forcing people to reimagine friendship, marriage and other forms of togetherness. All of these projects are strongly engaged with feminist theory and debates, which is a central concern of her work.
In addition to these interests, Professor D’Souza is active as an art critic, having written for publications such as Art in America, Time Out New York, and Bookforum. Essays on artists such as Janet Cardiff, Mona Hatoum, and Richard Serra have appeared in these and other publications.
Professor D’Souza has been the recipient of a number of research fellowships, including those from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1994-1998), the Getty Foundation (2007), and the Clark Art Institute (2008).
