Current PhD Students

Laura Selene Rockefeller

Thesis Title:

Christiana Swan Sargent: A Window into the Lives and Work of Women Artists in the Wake of the American and French Revolutions

Supervisors:

Professor Jennie Batchelor & Dr Sophie Coulombeau

Description:

This PhD project builds on the foundation of Laura’s thesis for the MFA in Creative Writing she received from Emerson College, Boston, for which she developed chapters of a historical novel about one woman’s trajectory as an artist during the Age of Revolutions. The working title of the book is The Colorful Life of Kitty Swan, and the story is based on extensive original research into the life of nineteenth-century artist Christiana (Kitty) Keadie Swan Sargent (1778-1867).

The novel’s underpinning research is timely in its reassessment of the political, social, and economic conditions of women who pursued artistic careers as painters in the United States, France, and England at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Kitty studied painting in Boston, in Paris, and in London, and Laura’s research will reveal the variety of conditions under which women painters were operating in all these locations.

Spotlighting these women’s unique talents and contributions, this research asks: What was it about the political and social atmospheres on the opposite sides of the Atlantic that allowed women artists to flourish in France, but has left most of the American women artists of the era hidden in the historical record under the shadow of a father or husband? Both countries were emerging from revolutions and creating new governments that supposedly championed liberty and equality, however, the challenges these women artists faced may illustrate the ways in which those professed ideals were curtailed when it came time to put them into practice. At the beginning of another new century and amidst new political upheaval, it will be powerful for this novel to illuminate the way that women have felt called to express themselves through art in similarly challenging times.