Hannah Rose Blakeley

Bio/Description

Profile

Hannah Rose Blakeley specializes in modern European art, with a focus on Belgium. Her dissertation, "The Carnivalesque and Belgian Modernism," interweaves research in the fields of art, popular media, history, literature, and philosophy, investigating how representations of carnival in works by the Belgian artists James Ensor (1860–1949) and Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946) engage questions of political upheaval, social transgression, colonial violence, and modern selfhood at the turn of the twentieth century.

Blakeley received her B.A. in interdisciplinary studies and French from Emory University and an MLitt in art history from the University of St Andrews, where she was a Robert T. Jones Memorial Scholar. Her master’s dissertation, “Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Realism, and the Female Form,” built on her undergraduate curation of an online exhibition of Rops’s prints in Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, where she served as an intern. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Blakeley taught English for a year at Die Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, Austria, through Fulbright Austria. In addition to Belgian modernism, her research interests include 19th- and early 20th-century Dutch art, printmaking, miniatures, and text-image relationships. 

Blakeley has presented her research at international conferences in Belgium, the UK, the Netherlands, and the U.S. She has published a feuillet entitled “Le 17e siècle de Rops: vers la modernité,” in conjunction with a Henri De Braekeleer exhibition at the Musée Félicien Rops in Namur, Belgium, and has a forthcoming scholar interview on Mu.ZEE's monographic website devoted to the life and work of Léon Spilliaert, leonspilliaert.be. She is the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Student Program research grant (2022–23) and a Belgian American Education Foundation fellowship (2022–23) in support of her dissertation research in Belgium. During the 2024–25 academic year, she is a Quin Morton Teaching Fellow in the Princeton Writing Program, teaching two freshman writing seminars on “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Field(s)
Modern Art