Faculty Highlight: Professor Alsdorf Book Q&A

April 6, 2022

Professor Bridget Alsdorf recently participated in a Q&A about her new book, Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France (2022). Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer.