VALS: Dr. Marika Takanishi Knowles

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Dr. Marika Takanishi Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews (Scotland), where she teaches and researches French art of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. She is interested in the relationships between social phenomena and visual art, particularly in the realm of sociability and interpersonal encounters, which she has studied through the consideration of theatricality and more recently, the social world of the marketplace. The comparative study of the historical experiences of women and artistic representations of gender 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 late 2023 or early 2024. Recent and ongoing projects include a study of paperwork and the visual representation of bureaucracy in nineteenth-century France, including French Algeria, and a 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 Édouard Manet, Nadar, ornamental motifs for goldsmithing, and the femme forte (strong woman).