About the Author

Michelle Facos teaches art history at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research explores the changing relationship between artists and society since the Enlightenment as well as issues of identity. Other publications include Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Painting of the 1890s (1998), Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, co-edited with Sharon Hirsh (2003), Symbolist Art in Context (2009), Symbolist Roots of Modern Art, co-edited with Thor J. Mednick (2015), and A Companion to 19th-Century Art (2018), a volume of 29 essays that deepen and broader our understanding of Western Art, with chapters on the art market, the Grand Tour, academies, exhibition practice, landscape, psychology, public sculpture, religion, 'Orientalism', and nation-specific chapters on Australia, Catalonia, Denmark, Estonia and Latvia, Hungary, Poland, Russia.

Her passion for history was ignited by the history teaching brothers Doug and Lyall Stewart of Kenmore, NY. It was sustained at Hamilton College by Jerry Townsend and Michael Haltzel. At the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University a host of brilliant teachers -- H.W. Janson, Robert Rosenblum, Gert Schiff, and Kirk Varnedoe -- guided her study in the direction of art and culture beginning with the Enlightenment.

Professor Facos has also taught art history in China, Germany, Poland, and Sweden. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Alfried Krupp Research Collegium Greifswald, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Fulbright. A citizen of Sweden and the United States, her free time is spent exploring the world. She spent the COVID-19 pandemic happily stranded in Paris, where she wrote an historical novel based on the life of French painter Rosa Bonheur. Find out more about her here.