Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1949, Susan Locke Siegfried spent her girlhood in Illinois and teen years in Oregon. She studied at Wellesley College and Harvard University, completing her doctorate before holding the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford from 1982 to 1985. She has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Leeds, and the University of Michigan, where she was Denise Riley Collegiate Professor of the History of Art and Women’s Studies and is now Professor Emerita. A specialist in French art and visual culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, her scholarship—supported by senior fellowships at institutions including the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Clark Art Institute—includes influential books on Louis‑Léopold Boilly and Jean‑Auguste‑Dominique Ingres, as well as a recent major study of the intersection of art and fashion in the early nineteenth century.
Susan Siegfried
Rhodes Visiting Fellow & St Hilda's 1982
On learning about the Fellowship
I applied for the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship at a moment when I was trying to imagine how a doctoral dissertation might become a book, and how a young scholar might gain the intellectual freedom needed to rethink early research on a larger scale. At the time, I was an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in only my second year of teaching, and I was actively seeking a supported leave that would enable me to develop my dissertation on the critical reception of the French history painter Jean‑Auguste‑Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) into a first monograph.
I do not recall with certainty how I first learned of the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship. It may have been through my own investigation of postdoctoral fellowships and grants, or possibly through my PhD adviser at Harvard University, Henri Zerner, who knew Francis Haskell, Professor of Art History at Oxford, and was aware of the archive of French nineteenth‑century art criticism he had assembled there. That archive closely complemented my research interests, and the possibility of working in Oxford’s libraries and collections was immediately compelling.
I was surprised to be awarded the Fellowship. The competition was held only every three years, rotated geographically, and was open to women from all fields. I was fortunate that it was available to applicants in the northern hemisphere in the year I applied. Though still early in my academic career, I was granted leave by an administration at Northwestern that was supportive of a newly expanded department and willing to invest in its junior faculty. Looking back, that institutional generosity, combined with the opportunity Oxford offered, proved decisive for the direction my work would take.
The interview at the hosting institution, St Hilda’s College, was impressively inquisitorial. A long row of tutors faced the applicant, with Francis Haskell brought in as my external examiner, a format I later learned was standard in British academic interviews. My application coincided with a period of growing interest in interdisciplinary approaches across history and modern languages that embraced art and visual culture. I was indebted to tutors such as Menna Prestwich and Janet Haworth in modern history and Angelica Goodden, whose work addressed the literary and artistic life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Principal of St Hilda’s, Mary Moore (1980–90), later a trustee of the Rhodes Trust, was notably supportive of the college’s predominantly female fellowship in the arts and humanities.
Recollections of time in Oxford
During my three years in residence at St Hilda’s College (1982–85), I had very little contact with Rhodes House. Under the wardenship of Dr Robin Fletcher, it functioned primarily as an administrative centre, dispensing bursaries and offering limited social activities. Unlike Rhodes Scholars, Visiting Fellows were not required to attend termly progress meetings and, although women had by then been admitted as Scholars, there was a sense that Rhodes House did not quite know what to do with its women members, let alone with a small group of postdoctoral Fellows. At the time, this distance was experienced as isolating; with hindsight, it appears a missed opportunity for intellectual exchange.
My strongest memories of Oxford centre on discovering the extraordinary richness of its libraries. Chief among these were the Bodleian and the Taylorian, together with the remarkable collection of early Salon criticism housed in the History of Art department at 35 Beaumont Street. I spent long hours exploring these holdings, which opened new vistas of research and reshaped my understanding of nineteenth‑century art criticism. Working in the pre‑digital era meant taking extensive handwritten notes and relying on photocopying, but I still consult the research materials I assembled during those years.
I also immersed myself in the city’s museums: the Ashmolean Museum (then home to the Beazley Archive), Christ Church Picture Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Ruskin School of Art, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Natural History Museum. Beyond these, I sought out notable works housed in college collections, including Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial at University College, Louis‑Léopold Boilly’s trompe‑l’oeil Crucifix in Magdalen College Chapel (since sold), and Pre‑Raphaelite stained glass in Christ Church Cathedral and Harris Manchester College. Another vivid aspect of Oxford’s intellectual life was attending lectures by eminent scholars, among them the literary critic Terry Eagleton.
Visiting postdoctoral Fellows, like graduate students, were largely left to structure their own intellectual and social lives. St Hilda’s provided a formal setting, if not an especially collegial one, and neither the History of Art unit nor Rhodes House organised regular scholarly gatherings. History of Art at Oxford at that time had very limited institutional presence. It scarcely functioned as a department, consisting of a single professor appointed through the Faculty of History and supported by a secretary, with undergraduate teaching supplemented by Dr Jon Whiteley, Assistant Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum.
Francis and Larissa Haskell occasionally hosted dinners at their home, where one met graduate students from Britain, France, Switzerland and Canada who had come to Oxford to work with him. These students were drawn by his transformation of the study of French eighteenth‑ and nineteenth‑century art and formed a vitally important intellectual circle for me. This group was supplemented by colleagues such as Joanna Woodall, then Assistant Curator at Christ Church Picture Gallery (and squash partner!), and historians Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, who tutored special subjects in the history of art. With several of these friends and colleagues, I explored Oxfordshire and beyond, visiting Chastleton House, Devil’s Quoits, and Blenheim Palace, and attended conferences in Oxford and London. Many of these professional relationships have endured.
What emerged from the Fellowship
One of the most significant outcomes of the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship for me was the expansion of my understanding of the intellectual reach of art history and of the substantial changes then under way in the discipline. An interdisciplinary conference on the body in eighteenth‑century culture organised by Angelica Goodden at St Hilda’s proved formative, and I published an early formulation of my later research in the volume of essays that emerged from it. Another major focus of scholarly debate at the time was reception theory, and several art historians working around Haskell were, like me, recovering and documenting forms of nineteenth‑century art criticism.
That loose collective of graduate students and scholars generated two important initiatives: the three‑volume Bibliography of French Salon Criticism, 1699–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1986, 1991, 2012) and the revitalised Oxford Art Journal, which published my early article on Boilly’s trompe‑l’oeil painting, including the Magdalen Crucifix. During these years, I also met British art historians who would become important to my later professional and personal life, including Adrian Rifkin, who later appointed me to the faculty at the University of Leeds, and Alexander Potts, who subsequently became my husband.
Life after Oxford
After three years in Oxford, I decided not to return to my teaching position in the United States and instead moved to Paris, where I spent two years researching an exhibition on the French genre painter Louis‑Léopold Boilly (1761–1845) for the Art Institute of Chicago and the Musée du Louvre (1985–87). The exhibition that I guest‑curated was eventually shown at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, accompanied by my monograph The Art of Louis‑Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (Yale University Press, 1995).
On returning to the United States, I joined the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, working in the Art History Information Program (1987–95), a pioneering division devoted to digital technologies in the humanities before the widespread adoption of the internet. In this role, I directed research projects designed to translate the needs of art historians, museum curators and humanities scholars into functional requirements for computer scientists developing new tools for visual and textual data. One of the early corpora used in experiments on pattern matching and image retrieval was the Beazley Archive of Attic vase painting in Oxford. This period was a formative and idealistic stage in what later became known as digital humanities and gave me a broader perspective on both my field and the institutional structures that supported it.
At the same time, completing my book on Boilly rekindled my desire to return to sustained art‑historical research. I re‑entered academe after being offered a professorship at the University of Leeds (1996–2002), where I resumed work on early research into Ingres and nineteenth‑century French art. That research eventually took shape in two books: Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres and David (with Todd Porterfield, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006) and Ingres: Painting Reimagined (Yale University Press, 2009).
In 2002, I returned to the United States and became Denise Riley Collegiate Professor of the History of Art and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, following the appointment of my husband, Alexander Potts, as Chair of the History of Art department. We remained in Ann Arbor until 2019, when we retired to London to be closer to family.
Conclusion
Looking back, the most enduring impact of the Rhodes Visiting Fellowship was not simply the publications or professional contacts that emerged from it, important though those were, but the way it expanded my sense of what art history could be. Oxford exposed me to an unusually wide intellectual terrain and to debates that were reshaping the discipline, from reception theory to interdisciplinary approaches linking art, literature and history. The Fellowship also gave me the time and confidence to take intellectual risks, including leaving an established academic position in the United States to pursue research opportunities in Europe.
In later years, my career took me into museum work, digital humanities and academic leadership, but many of the questions I continued to pursue, about viewers, institutions and the afterlives of works of art, were sharpened during my years in Oxford. When I renewed contact with Rhodes House after retiring to London in 2019, I found an institution transformed: outward‑looking, inclusive and deeply engaged with the intellectual and ethical challenges of the present. It was heartening to see how much had changed, and to recognise, in retrospect, how formative the Fellowship had been in shaping both my professional life and my understanding of scholarly community.