How to apply

Entry criteria
This award is only open to students from the UK and EU. You should have an MA or equivalent research experience in a relevant area of French Studies and native or near native competence in French.

To apply
To apply send the following documents to Morwenna Hussey at the contact address given below by 18 December 2009. Please note that all documentation is required in English

• Completed University of Exeter application form in hardcopy (download an application form)
• Two academic references (download a reference form)
• Curriculum vitae
• Degree transcripts

Morwenna Hussey, Postgraduate Administrator
Department of Modern Languages, University of Exeter
Queen’s Building, The Queen’s Drive
Exeter, Devon EX4 4QH

If you have any queries about the application process please contact Morwenna Hussey, email  m.t.hussey@exeter.ac.uk, tel +44 (0) 1392 269305.
 

About the award

The Department for Modern Languages is currently offering with effect from 1 January 2010 a three-year studentship to support research leading to successful completion of a PhD on the topic ‘The Jury of the Paris Fine Art Salon, 1831-1852’. This thesis will form one part of a three-part AHRC-funded project entitled Painting for the Salon? The French State, Artists and Academy, 1830-1852, managed by Dr James Kearns, Director of French Studies, and also including an AHRC-funded Associate Research Fellowship.

The research topic
From 1831, when King Louis-Philippe delegated to the Académie des beaux-arts responsibility for managing the process by which a jury determined which works were to be admitted to the Paris Salon and which rejected, the manner in which the Academy exercised this responsibility became the source of increasingly bitter controversy, with profound implications for the subsequent history of French art. The jury’s procedures and decisions, the manner in which these were represented by artists, art administrators and supporters and opponents of the Academy during this period, will be the subject of the thesis.

On the basis of the jury's decisions and their impact within the art community, there emerged during this period the paradigm of French nineteenth-century art history as the struggle by innovative artists to gain admission to a conservative institution hostile to their work. In the absence of any detailed analysis of the jury's decisions, the highly selective evidence of its rejection of works by major figures opposed to the dominant neo-classical legacy of the period became a key element in art history's construction of the avant-garde and its narrative of modernism. Since even cursory study of the archives suggests that the selection process was subject to a far wider range of motivations than this paradigm would suggest, the student's task will be to carry out the first rigorous analysis of every aspect of the process at this time, including:

• variations in the jury's composition, attendance and voting procedures;
• proportions of accepted to rejected works from one category of subject-matter to another and one category of artist to another;
• reasons given for admission or rejection;
• political and professional pressures to which the jury was subject.

The student's research will thereby provide the means of a major re-evaluation of the jury's role in French nineteenth-century art historiography.

Studentship details
This studentship is funded by the AHRC and covers the following:

• Tuition fees (UK/EU rate)
• Maintenance at AHRC standard rate (UK students only)
   

Further Information
Academic enquiries can be made to Dr James Kearns, Director of French Studies, email  j.kearns@exeter.ac.uk, tel. +44 (0) 1392 264213.

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