Dr. Sara Pappas

Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture
  • Profile

    Sara Pappas is a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, art, and culture and twentieth and twenty-first-century critical museum studies. Her work focuses on the connection between the literary and plastic arts in nineteenth-century France and how that history is represented in today’s museum. She has published articles in a range of French studies and interdisciplinary journals.  

    Pappas is currently working on two research projects. The first, Naturalism’s Imaginary Museum: Art Critics, their Novels, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century, examines how art novels from the nineteenth century provide optimal access to the questions that still haunt the categorization of art in museums today. Her second project, Where the Salon Ends, explores the connection between contemporary artists’ reinterpretations of and challenges to traditional European academic art in the context of what became of the annual Parisian art exhibition known as the Salon, for many centuries the most important forum through which to establish a successful career as an artist in France. 

  • Publications
    Journal Articles

    “Fragments of the Past: the Petit Palais, the Exposition universelle, and the ghosts of French Imperialism.” Dix-Neuf, Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes, Volume 24, Issue 2-3 (October 2020), pp. 245-259.  

    "The Lessons of Champfleury." Nineteenth-Century French Studies Vol 42, Numbers 1& 2 (Fall/Winter 2013-2014): pp. 51-73.  

    "The View from the Bridge: Zola's L'Oeuvre and its Many Composites." Word and Image Volume 27:2 (June 2011), pp. 234-245.  

    "Opening the Door: Reinterpreting Interior Space and Transpositions of Art in La Fille aux yeux d'or via Assia Djebar." Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures Volume 64:3 (2010): pp. 169-186. 

    "All that Glitters: Connecting Baudelaire's Art Criticism to his Poetry."  French Forum Volume 33:3 (Fall 2008): pp. 35-53. 

    "Reading for Detail: On Zola's Abandonment of Impressionism."  Word and Image Volume 23, Number 4 (October-December 2007): pp. 474-484.

    ”Managing Imitation: Translation and Baudelaire’s Art Criticism.”  Nineteenth-Century French Studies Volume 33, Numbers 3&4 (Spring/Summer 2005): pp 320-341.