Art historian to focus on politically motivated pornography

Art Historian Laura Auricchio will discuss "Beyond the Body of the Queen: Critiques of Masculinity in the Pornographic Caricatures of the French Revolution" when she delivers the spring Art History Lecture Thursday, April 1.

Free and open to the public, the lecture will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Auricchio, assistant professor of art history at Parsons, the New School of Design, and Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, will discuss the politically motivated pornographic caricatures that targeted Marie-Antoinette during the French Revolution. The lecture will examine how the caricatures' depictions of masculinity gone awry served to criticize the Marquis de Lafayette, a prominent political figure reputed to be one of the queen's lovers.

A specialist in the areas of 18 ^th-century French visual culture, 18 ^th-century trans-Atlantic cultural history, contemporary art, and gender studies, Auricchio is the author of Ad la de Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution (2009, J. Paul Getty Museum). She has published articles in a number of academic and professional journals, including Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Genders. In addition, she contributed five biographical articles and one thematic survey to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History (2008, Oxford University Press).

Auricchio earned a B.A. degree at Harvard University, and two master's degrees and a Ph.D. degree at Columbia University. Her honors include a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Fulbright grant.

The Department of Art History and the Gender Studies Program are sponsors of the April 1 lecture.