Amy Freund
Amy Freund is an associate professor and the Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History at Southern Methodist University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and began her teaching career in the SMU art history department in 2005 as a Haakon Predoctoral Fellow. She subsequently held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Before joining the SMU faculty in 2014, she was an assistant professor at Texas Christian University.
Freund is a specialist in 18th-century European art. Her first book, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2014), examines the ways in which sitters and artists used portraiture to reformulate personal and political identity during the French Revolution. Articles related to this project have been published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Art Bulletin and in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (Ashgate, 2010). Her second book, Noble Beasts: Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2025) analyzes the representation of the hunt in late 17th- and 18th-century France. Research from this project has been published in Art History, Journal18, and several edited volumes. Freund is also the past president of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA): https://hecaa18.org.
Education
Ph.D. and M.A., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley
A.B., Art History, summa cum laude, Princeton University
Recent Work
Research
European art of the long eighteenth century; politics and visual culture; portraiture and the history of selfhood; the visual representation of animals; gender and representation; the history and decoration of mechanical objects, especially guns.
Books
Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France. Penn State University Press, 2014.
Articles
“Harping on patriotism: female education meets Orléanist ambition in Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust’s The Harp Lesson (1791),” co-authored with Tom Stammers, French History 38.1 (2024) https://academic.oup.com/fh/article/38/1/58/7584017
Guest editor, “Field Notes,” special issue of Journal18 (9, Spring 2020)
“Cats: The Soft Underbelly of the Enlightenment,” co-authored with Michael Yonan, Journal18 #7 (Spring 2019).
“Sexy Beasts: The Politics of Hunting Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Art History 42.1 (February 2019) 40-67.
“Good Dog! Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the Politics of Animal Painting,” in French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, ed. Heather MacDonald, 66-79. Lucia/Marquand, distributed by Yale University Press, 2016.
“Men and Hunting Guns in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe, eds. Jennifer Germann and Heidi Strobel. Ashgate, 2016.
“The Citoyenne Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Revolution.” The Art Bulletin 93.3 (September 2011): 325-344.
The Revolution at Home: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Political Identity in French Family Portraiture, 1789-1795.” In Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1780-1914, edited by Temma Balducci, Heather Jensen, and Pamela Warner, 15-29. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.
“The Legislative Body: Print Portraits of the National Assembly, 1789-1791.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41.3 (Spring 2008): 337-358.
Distinctions
Clark Fellow, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, Spring 2021
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Fall 2017.
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, American Library Association, for Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France, 2015.
Godbey Book Award for Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France, Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, SMU, 2015.
John H. Daniels Research Fellowship, National Sporting Library, Middleburg, Va., 2008.
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2006-08.
Haakon Predoctoral Fellowship in Art History, Division of Art History at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, 2004-06.
Course list
| Early modern European art | |
| The global 18th century | |
| Portraiture | |
| Animals in art | |
| France 1500-1914 | |
| The decorative arts and the history of dress | |
| The visual arts and the French Revolution |
