Meredith Martin

Candidate statement

Meredith Martin is associate professor of art history at NYU and the Institute of Fine Arts. Specializing in French art and architecture from the 17th to 19th Centuries, she is the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard University Press, 2011), and a co-editor of Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (special issue of Art History, 2015) and Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Ashgate, 2010). Along with historian Gillian Weiss, Dr. Martin has recently completed a book entitled The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Slavery in Louis XIV’s France, for which they were awarded an ACLS Collaborative Fellowship (2016-2018). She is currently working on several projects, among them an exhibition on the 1720 Mississippi and South Sea bubbles that will open at The New York Public Library in October 2020; a study of diplomatic and artistic relations between France and Thailand (c. 1650-1900); and a history of porcelain rooms from the 17th C. to the present, which includes the restaging of an 18th-C. ballet known as the Ballet des Porcelaines. Dr. Martin is a founding editor of Journal18 (www.journal18.org), an online journal devoted to 18th-C. art and culture from around the globe. She wishes to expand ASECS’s interdisciplinary focus while making it more diverse in membership and more global in scope. She would also like to brainstorm new conference formats and to bring members together by having them perform tableaux vivants at conferences.