A public lecture by Kathryn Desplanque as part of the Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series
5:30 p.m., Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Room 102, Frederic Lasserre Building
6333 Memorial Road, University of British Columbia
Please contact the AHVA Visual Resources Centre for access to the event recording: ahva.vrc@ubc.ca
Kathryn Desplanque presents her findings from her first book project, Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Market for Art in Paris, 1750–1850 (University of Delaware Press, 2025). Exploring a corpus of over 500 published satirical images and over 70 items of popular and panoramic fiction, Desplanque tracks the emerging and evolving trope of the starving artist across multiple political regimes. Through an analysis that marries the trope’s shifts and fluctuations with structural upheavals in Paris’ art world, Desplanque excavates the lost voices of Parisian artists as they protested the impacts of structural change on their material livelihood and creative production. Desplanque’s scholarly voice straddles the material and the intellectual, and through personal narrative, material explorations, and memories of serendipity and whimsy, they weave the experience of research into the storytelling of its findings.
Kathryn Desplanque (she/they), a queer mixed Black multigenerational immigrant raised in Ottawa, Ontario, is currently on unpaid leave from her role as assistant professor of 18th– and 19th–century European art history at UNC Chapel Hill, and is serving on a contract as curator at Carleton University Art Gallery. Desplanque earned her PhD from Duke University in 2017 and held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. Desplanque’s first book, Inglorious Artists: Art-World Satire and the Emergence of a Capitalist Market for Art in Paris, 1750–1850, is published by University of Delaware press alongside the digital publication of her corpus available from UNC Chapel Hill Digital Services. Her scholarship has been published in RACAR, Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Art Bulletin, and several edited volumes.
We acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
Image: Anonymous. Monsieur Crouton dans son Attelier, ou le Triomphe des arts, 1816. Published by Aaron Martinet. Paris, Musée Carnavalet.
