CAA News Today

The Distinguished Scholar session at the 112th CAA Annual Conference will honor the acclaimed career of S. Hollis Clayson. Clayson has been at the forefront of art history scholarship as part of the first generation of feminist academics whose work centers on representations of the female body, the role of art in social and political conflict, and the intersection of art and technology.

Hollis Clayson is Professor Emerita of Art History and Bergen Evans Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Northwestern University where she taught for thirty-five years, advising twenty-seven doctoral dissertations. A specialist in nineteenth-century European art, she has published widely on art practice in Paris as well as transatlantic cultural exchanges, especially those between France and the United States. Her books include Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (Yale University Press, 1991), Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870–71) (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850–1900, co-edited with André Dombrowski (Routledge, 2016), and Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Époque (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Her book in progress is entitled The Dark Side of the Eiffel Tower.

Clayson’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the Huntington Library, Columbia University’s Reid Hall in Paris, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art. In early 2014, she was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Culture.

From 2006–13 she served as the founding Director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. She was Sterling Clark Professor in Art History, Williams College in fall 2005; the Samuel H. Kress Professor at CASVA (2013–14; and in fall 2015, she was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Most recently, she was the 2022–23 R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library.

Dr. Clayson’s career and her impact on the field will be celebrated with presentations and a dialogue with scholars and colleagues:

Session Chairs:

Anne Helmreich, Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Hector Reyes, University of Southern California

Session Panelists:

Thomas Crow, New York University

André Dombrowski, University of Pennsylvania

Marc Gotlieb, Williams College

Martha Ward, University of Chicago

The AC2024 Distinguished Scholar Session will be held on Thursday, February 15, 4:30–6:30 p.m. CT at the Hilton Chicago. This event will also be livestreamed on YouTube. 

Register now for the CAA 112th Annual Conference, February 14–17, 2024 in Chicago!