Rachel Skokowski

Research

I completed a BA in French and Art History at Princeton University, and an MSt in Modern languages (French & Enlightenment Studies) at the University of Oxford.

My DPhil research examines the etchings made by Jules and Edmond de Goncourt alongside their work as novelists, art critics and art historians. Using an interdisciplinary approach to text and image, my thesis explores the different ways in which the Goncourt brothers’ work as etchers, or aquafortistes, influenced their writing.

In addition to nineteenth-century French literature and art history, my research interests also include ekphrastic writing, Diderot’s Salons, and the history of collecting. 

Teaching

Paper XII: Literature and the Visual Arts (lecture and seminars), Paper III: Baudelaire (tutorials)

Presentations & Publications

“From Lithography to the Lorette: Gavarni’s Les Lorettes Vieillies and the Goncourts’ La Lorette” Society of Dix-Neuvièmistes Annual Conference, Newcastle (April 2018)

“Making their Mark: Works by Female Printmakers” Ashmolean Museum Print Room Talk, Oxford (April 2018)

“Manette Salomon” The Literary Encyclopedia. Vol 1.5.2.05: Nineteenth-Century French Writing and Culture, 1800-1900. 

“Collecting Chaos: Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un Artiste” Medieval & Modern Languages Graduate Conference, University of Oxford (June 2017)

“Re-Fashioning the Monument du Costume: A New Examination of the 1793 edition” Vol no. 48, Les Etudes Rétiviennes. (December 2016)

“Une Imagination Reglée”: The Role of Imagined Paintings in Diderot’s Salons” French Graduate Seminar, University of Oxford (November 2016)

“Rotating Dial Clocks and the Visualization of Time in Eighteenth-Century France” Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar, University of Oxford (May 2016)