Alison Syme
Areas of interest
- European and American 19th- and early 20th-century French, British, and American art and visual culture
- Queer theory
- Feminism
- Psychoanalysis
- Fin-de-siècle studies
- History of science
Biography
My research primarily focuses on art of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, France, and the United States. Within this field, I study a range of different topics and traditions, from the neo-medievalism to society portraiture to early abstraction. All of my research, however, is characterized by a commitment to close looking, examination of the intersection of fine art and visual culture, interdisciplinary inquiry, and analysis of the role of metaphors in artistic practice and poetics.
A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art considers Sargent in the context of botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture, and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to “naturalize” sexual inversion.
Select publications
- “Morisot’s Urbane Ecologies,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Impressionism, ed. Andre Dombrowski (Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2021)
- “‘All that is solid melts into air’: Burne-Jones, Glaciation, and the Matter of History,” in Victorian Science and Imagery: The Evolution of Form in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, ed. Nancy Marshall (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2021)
- “The Media of Sight: Burne-Jones and the Graiae,” Victorian Studies 62.2 (Winter 2020): 253–267.
- “Pressed Flowers: Burne-Jones, the Romaunt of the Rose, and the Kelmscott Chaucer,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 29 (Fall 2019): 42–69.
- “Bohemians of the Vegetable World,” in Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Re-Thinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, ed. Jongwoo Kim and Christopher Reed, 10–23 (New York: Routledge, 2017)
- “Screens of Vegetation; or, The Cyber Gardens of Philomène Longpré,” in Philomène Longpré: Transcendare. Ouvres-Systèmes Sensibles/Responsive Art Systems, ed. Christine Redfern (Montreal: Ellephant, 2016), 39–59.
- “Über Geschichten von pflanzlichen Vampiren – oder moderne Verbrauchernachrichten” (“Tales of Vegetable Vampires; or, Modern Consumer Reports”), trans. Daniel Schreiber, in Floriographie: Die Sprachen der Blumen, ed. Isabel Kranz, Alexander Schwann, and Eike Wittrock (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 315–335.
- Willow (London: Reaktion, 2014)
- A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010)
- “Love Among the Ruins: David Cannon Dashiell’s Queer Mysteries,” Art Journal 63:4 (Winter 2004): 80–95.
Awards & recognition
- A Touch of Blossom shortlisted for the 2011 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize
- UTM Teaching Excellence Award, 2009
- Wyeth Fellowship 2002–2004, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington DC
- GSAS Prize Fellowship 1998–1999, Harvard University
- Bernice B. Cronkhite Fellowship 1997-1998, Radcliffe College