Carol Armstrong

Carol Armstrong, appointed to the faculty of the Department of the History of Art at Yale in 2007, teaches and writes about 19th-century French painting, the history of photography, the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory, and the representation of women and gender in art and visual culture. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 1986 and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Princeton University, where she was professor of art and archaeology and Doris Stevens Professor of Women’s Studies from 1999 to 2007, as well as director of the program in the Study of Women and Gender from 2004 to 2007. She has published books and essays on Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and 19th and 20th century photography, and modern and contemporary women artists. Her book, Cézanne’s Gravity, concerning some of Cézanne’s afterlives, won the 2019 Robert Motherwell Book Award for an Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts. She has curated exhibitions at Princeton University Art Museum, the Drawing Center in New York, the Yale Center for British Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. In 2013, on the occasion of the 150-year anniversary of Edouard Manet’s two most famous paintings, she co-curated an exhibition called “Lunch with Olympia” with Robert Storr at the Yale University School of Art’s Edgewood Gallery. In December 2021, she organized and contributed to the conference “Woman/Artist,” gathering together several generations of Yale artists, art historians, and students to address anew the famously sarcastic question posed by Linda Nochlin in 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”  She has been a frequent contributor to October and Artforum magazines, and continues to be an active art critic. She is currently working on a new project on modern medium-specificities in the visual and verbal arts, considered from a feminist point of view, to be titled Medium Matrix Materiality.  A collection of her essays, Painting Photography Painting, was published by Mack Books in the Fall of 2023.