Jennifer Olmsted
Biography
Jennifer W. Olmsted is Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Northwestern University in 2005 and holds an M.A. in art history from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. in art history from Bryn Mawr College. Dr. Olmsted offers classes on 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century European art, including broad overviews as well as special topics like Impressionism, Orientalism, Vincent van Gogh, and the history of women artists from 1600 to the present.
In her research, Dr. Olmsted focuses on 19th-century French art with particular emphases on the fashioning of masculinity in French painting and on French representations of North African and Eastern Mediterranean cultures. Dr. Olmsted’s research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, as well as several grants from Wayne State University, including the Dean’s Creative/Research Grant, a University Research Grant, and the President’s Research Enhancement Program in the Arts. She has published essays and reviews in journals like Art History, The Art Bulletin, nonsite, caa.reviews, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Her book Delacroix’s Moroccans: Art and Masculinity (forthcoming from The Pennsylvania State University Press in September 2025) examines the intersection of gender, race, and imperialism in Eugène Delacroix’s representations of Arab men from his famous trip to Morocco in 1832. She is currently working on a second book that explores how French artists and sitters used portraiture to stake claims to elite status during the tumultuous first half of the nineteenth century.
Degrees and Certifications
Ph.D. Northwestern University
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.A. Bryn Mawr College
Courses Taught
AH 1120 Survey of Art History, Renaissance-Modern
AH 3650 Nineteenth-Century European Art and Architecture
AH 5560 Special Topics: Women Artists, 1600-2000
AH 5695 Art of Revolutionary Europe
AH 5705 Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
AH 5710 Trends in Nineteenth-Century Art
AH 5715 Modernism Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
AH 5735 Art 1900-1945
AH 5997 Seminar: Portraiture in the Modern Era
AH 5997 Seminar: Vincent van Gogh
Recent Publications
Forthcoming: Delacroix's Moroccans: Art and Masculinity (College Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming 2025).
"The Form of Memory: Delacroix and the Sketchbook," Art History 47, no. 1 (February 2024): 66-47. https://doi.org/10.1093/arthis/ulae002
"Divided Allegiances: French Images of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, 1798-1848," in Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism, ed. by Jennifer R. Henneman (New Haven: Yale University Press for Denver Art Museum, 2023), 37-46. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300266047/near-east-to-far-west/
“In Defense of Painting: Delacroix’s Lion Hunt at the 1855 Exposition Universelle,” nonsite 27, special issue: The Nineteenth Century: Part Two, February 2019. https://nonsite.org/in-defense-of-painting/
“Public and Private Identities in Delacroix’s Portrait of Charles de Mornay and Anatole Demidoff,” in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1780-1914, ed. by Temma Balducci, Heather Jensen, and Pamela Warner (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2011), 47-64.
https://www.routledge.com/Interior-Portraiture-and-Masculine-Identity-in-France-17891914/Balducci-Jensen-Warner/p/book/9781138254244#
“The Sultan’s Authority: Delacroix, Painting and Politics at the Salon of 1845,” The Art Bulletin 91, no. 1 (March 2009): 83-106.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619658
“Du Maroc et de la modernité: les cavaliers arabes de Delacroix,” trans. by Paola Miglietti, Bulletin de la Société des Amis du Musée national Eugène Delacroix, no. 7 (2009): 19-24.
Responsibilities
Member and Chair, Graduate Committe in Art History (August 2005-present)
Member, Services to the Historians of the Visual Arts Committee, College Art Association (February 2024-February 2027)
College Promotion and Tenure Committee (August 2022-August 2024)
Courses taught by Jennifer Olmsted
Winter Term 2025 (future)
Fall Term 2024 (current)
- AH1120 - Survey of Art History: Renaissance through Modern
- AH5695 - Art of Revolutionary Europe
- AH7700 - Seminar in Modern Art
Fall Term 2023
- AH1120 - Survey of Art History: Renaissance through Modern
- AH5560 - Special Topics
- AH7700 - Seminar in Modern Art
Winter Term 2023
Fall Term 2022
- AH1120 - Survey of Art History: Renaissance through Modern
- AH5710 - Trends in Nineteenth Century Art