Lea C. Stephenson
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
Education
M.A., Art History, Williams College, Graduate Program in the History of Art, 2017
B.A., Art History, Temple University, 2015
Research Interests
Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American art and visual culture, portraiture, materiality, art and the senses, Orientalism, history of collecting, American and British interiors.
Biography
Lea Stephenson is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Delaware, where her work focuses on late nineteenth-century American and British art, specifically the Gilded Age. Her interests include the relationship between art and the senses, embodiment, materiality, portraiture, and imperialism. Her dissertation, “ ‘Wonderful Things’: Egyptomania, Empire, and the Senses, 1870–1922,” considers American and British artists and collectors in Egypt during the Gilded Age and the embodied and material engagement with the modern country and ancient empire. This project explores the multi-sensorial perception tied to Egyptomania, and the entangled colonial or racial ideologies. Lea received her BA from Temple University in 2015, and her MA from Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 2017, where her qualifying paper explored John Singer Sargent’s ownership of Madame X through the lens of haunting and spiritualism. Stephenson has also previously worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Preservation Society of Newport County, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Clark Art Institute.
Selected Publications
Wendy Bellion, Lea C. Stephenson, and James Kelleher, with Allan McLeod and Kristen Nassif, “West on the Walls: The 1807 Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 21, no. 1 (Spring 2022), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2022.21.1.21.
Lea C. Stephenson, “Kingscote’s Dining Room and the Multisensorial Interior in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 20, no. 2 (Summer 2021), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2021.20.2.3.
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