Marika Knowles

A Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, Marika Takanishi Knowles teaches and researches French art of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. She is interested in the history of social life and the representation of human personality through a theatrical frame. More recently, she has considered the way the social world of the marketplace inflects the depiction of the human figure. The comparative study of the historical experience of gender and its representation in visual art also play an important role in her work. Her first monograph, Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain, was published in 2020 by the University of Delaware and University of Virginia Press. Her second monograph, Pierrot and his world: art, theatricality, and the marketplace in France, 1697-1945, is in press with Manchester University Press, with publication expected in January 2024. Recent and ongoing projects include a study of paperwork and the visual representation of bureaucracy in nineteenth-century France, including French Algeria and New Orleans, and a study of the seventeenth-century etcher, Jacques Callot and the figuration of distraction. She has co-edited special issues of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics (2020-21) and Word & Image (2021). She has also published on Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Nadar, ornamental motifs for goldsmithing, and the femme forte (strong woman).
Supervisors: Carol Armstrong