Art History Faculty Lecture with Elizabeth Browne | The Artful Nature of Terre in Eighteenth-Century French Mineralogy

Join us for the first Art History Faculty Lecture of the 2026-2027 academic year with Assistant Professor Elizabeth Browne, who will present “The Artful Nature of Terre in Eighteenth-Century French Mineralogy”. Lecture details forthcoming.

Elizabeth Saari Browne completed her PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture + Art at MIT. A specialist in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French sculpture and decorative arts, her research interests include rococo aesthetics, the gendering of artistic media and practices, global contact in the age of Enlightenment, and questions of materiality and art historiography. Her current book project, tentatively titled Modeling Sculpture: Clodion and the Aesthetics of Terracotta in the Eighteenth Century, examines the vases, satyrs and bacchantes, and women and children made in terracotta by the French sculptor Claude Michel, called Clodion (1738-1814). The first English-language monograph on Clodion’s clay compositions, the book situates their qualities of plasticity, mutability, and ambiguity within eighteenth-century theories of cognitive processes and burgeoning aesthetics, and challenges the idea of sculpture in the era of the Enlightenment as of a physically or conceptually stable form. Browne is also developing a second project on caricature and cruelty in eighteenth-century ornament.

Prior to joining the faculty at UGA, Browne worked in the curatorial departments of several museums, including Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. Her work has been published in Art History, the Burlington Magazine, the American Ceramic Circle Journal, the French Porcelain Society Journal, as well as in several exhibition catalogues.