Emma Barker joined the OU in September 1995, after having worked as a temporary lecturer at the universities of East Anglia, York, Warwick and Sussex. Her principal research interests are eighteenth and early nineteenth century French art, with special reference to genre painting; sentimentalism as a cultural and historical category. She is currently working on the single figure paintings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and on sentimentalism in late eighteenth-century painting, with reference to issues of cultural identity.
She has given papers at various British universities; the Association of Art Historians annual conference; the Wallace Collection, London; the College Art Association conference (USA); the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth college, New Hampshire; the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference; the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference and the Getty Center, Los Angeles.
She has contributed to numerous OU courses, including A216 Art and its Histories; A207 From Enlightenment to Romanticism, AA318 Art of the Twentieth Century and A841 Themes and Issues in Contemporary Art History. She is currently chair of the MA in Art History.
Contact E.Barker@open.ac.uk
Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment, Cambridge University Press, 2005
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The Changing Status of the Artist (ed. with Nick Webb and Kim Woods), Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999
Contemporary Cultures of Display (ed.), Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999
‘Mme Geoffrin, Painting and Galanterie: Carle Van Loo’s Conversation espagnole and Lecture espagnole’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40:4, 2007, 587-614
‘Putting the Viewer in the Frame: Greuze as Sentimentalist’, in Philip Conisbee (ed.), French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth-Century, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 72, (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 105-27
‘Women, Art and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France’ (review essay), Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40:1, 2006, 144-8
’Painting History/History Painting’ (review essay), Art History, 22:5, 1999, 760-66
’Painting and Reform in Eighteenth-Century France: Greuze’s L’Accordée de village’, Oxford Art Journal, 20:2, 1997, 42-52
See also Open Research Online for further details of Emma Barker’s research publications.
