Heather McPherson, Ph.D., professor in the UAB Department of Art and Art History, has been appointed a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for fall 2010. Her project, "The Artist's Studio and the Image of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France," examines the evolving image of the artist through the lens of artists' portraits and the artist's studio, which became a central theme in art and literature stretching from Balzac to Proust and from Géricault to Picasso. Drawing on a broad array of paintings, prints and photographs and primary texts, it will shed new light on the significance of the artist's studio and illuminate its key role as a platform for self-expression and the forging of identity in nineteenth-century France.
McPherson also has been elected president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a pioneering interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the advancement of scholarship on all aspects of 18th-century culture. Established in 1969, the society advances study and research in the history of a period that has profoundly influenced the modern world from the visual and performing arts to philosophy and the sciences.