Dr Marika Knowles

Dr Marika Knowles

Senior Lecturer in Art History

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 1948
Email
mk283@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Research areas

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. 

She has published two monographs: Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain (University of Delaware Press, 2020) and Pierrot and his world: art, theatricality, and the marketplace in France, 1697-1945 (Manchester University Press, 2024). Pierrot and his world will be published in a French translation by Les Presses du Réel in 2025. Her current research on the seventeenth-century etcher Jacques Callot, has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship (2026-2028) from the Leverhulme Trust, as well as a David and Julie Tobey Research Fellowship from Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2025).

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 her study of the seventeenth-century etcher, Jacques Callot. 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). 

Dr. Knowles advises theses on seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. She is interested in PhD proposals on artists or themes within this period. She particularly supports projects investigating gender, courtly life, the relationship between art and theatre, print culture, costume, and performative sociability. Proposals on the art and visual culture of French Algeria, as well as the relationship between word and image in nineteenth-century France (Romanticism to Impressionism) are also welcome.

Selected publications

 

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