Elisian is a second-year doctoral candidate at Keble College, Oxford. She studies nineteenth century French print culture from an art-historical as well as literary perspective, with emphasis on collectible illustrated books.
Her thesis examines how Symbolist and Decadent livres de luxe became instruments of self-fashioning within Parisian bibliophile societies of the fin-de-siècle. It traces the rise of bibliophilie créatrice from the 1880s, exploring how aristocratic and upper-bourgeois collectors acted as amateur editors of luxury collectible books, shaping the book’s material and symbolic form in closed circuits of production and reception. Her work focuses on the reciprocal relationship that develops between book and bibliophile, against the background of a destabilised sense of identity linked to social status, gender identity and the Decadent fear of a ‘fin de race’, brought about by the conditions of modernity. The thesis develops through a three-part arc defining the book-collector relationship; this begins with the act of reflection of the self in the book, continuing with projection onto fin-de-siècle archetypes of alterity (women, nature, animals, the ‘exotic’), eventually culminating in a corporeal relationship with the book. Elisian reads literary content alongside illustrations and treats the book as a material object, addressing issues of ownership, the tension between reading and collecting, creativity versus sterility, and spiritualism versus materialism. Overall, her work reframes the livre de luxe as a socio-material mechanism, shedding light on a cultural object that has long been dismissed as an example of Art Nouveau ‘period charm’.
Background
Elisian holds an MSt in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge. Prior to her graduate studies, she obtained an MArch (5-year integrated professional Masters in Architecture) from the National Technical University of Athens. She is a licensed architect and a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece.
During her time as an architecture student, Elisian also participated in several exhibitions, such as the 16th International Exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale (Greek Pavilion, ‘The School of Athens’).
Her graduate studies have so far been generously supported by scholarships from the following funding bodies in Greece: The Foundation for Education and European Culture (IPEP), the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the Union of Greek Shipowners (UGS - SYN-ENOSIS), the NEON Organisation for Culture and Development and the Lilian Voudouri Foundation.
Research Interests
Elisian’s research interests revolve around the 19th and early 20th centuries (1848-1914) in France. She specifically works on the dialogue between the visual arts, architecture and literature in this period (especially in the illustrated novel and the popular press). Particular areas of interest include:
Text and image relationships; Decadent literature and its relationship to art and material culture; bibliophilia and collecting; perceptions of urban space as conveyed through literature, visual culture and the popular press; the changing perception of time at the turn of the century as expressed in visual culture and literature; the appropriation and exotification of the past (especially the Middle Ages) for modern narratives in the second half of the 19th century; imaginaries of the past and the future.