Alison Syme

Acting Vice-Dean, Faculty July–December 2023
Undergraduate Appointment: Department of Visual Studies (UTM)
Graduate Appointment: Department of Art (St. George)
Cross-Appointments and Affiliations: Centre for the Study of the United States

Education

PhD in Art History from Harvard University, 2005
MA in Art History from Harvard University, 1999
Hon BA in Literary Studies and Art History from the University of Toronto, 1996

Teaching

At the 200 level, I teach surveys of 19th- and early 20th-century art. My European Art of the Nineteenth Century course (FAH287) regularly includes an optional trip to London and Paris over reading week. At the 300 and 400 levels, I teach theme-based courses on topics such as the dream of creating animate art, from lifelike paintings and moving statues to androids and cyborgs (FAH460: Art and Animation), art and exilic states (FAH457), and modern craft (FAH362). Hands-on projects, from automaton-building to mending, are incorporated in all my courses.

Research

My research primarily focuses on art of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, France, and the United States. Within this field, I study a range of different topics and traditions, from society portraiture to early abstraction. All of my research, however, is characterised by a commitment to close looking, examination of the intersection of art and visual culture, interdisciplinary enquiry, and analysis of the role of metaphors in artistic practice and poetics. My first book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (Penn State University Press, 2010), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2011, considers Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynaecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilised ideas of cross-fertilisation and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his works to “naturalise” sexual inversion, visually elaborating a floral poetics of sexual variety. I am currently working on two book projects. One is a co-edited, multi-volume set of primary sources on the Victorian artist. The second, Burne-Jones and the Book, explores the Victorian artist’s poetics of materials and animation strategies in the context of Victorian science and print culture. Other current research interests include the Omega Workshops, late 19th-century animal painting, and Morisot’s copies.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

FAH287  European Art of the Nineteenth Century
FAH288  European and North American Art of the Earlier Twentieth Century
FAH360  Art and Visual Culture of the Eighteenth Century
FAH388  Theory in Art History
FAH457  Exile and Modern Art
FAH460  Art and Animation

Graduate

FAH1001 Methods
FAH1477 Psychoanalysis and the Visual
FAH1486 Bloomsbury and Vorticism
FAH1478 Art and Animation