Nicole (Nikki) Georgopulos is an historian, curator, and educator specializing in European art of the nineteenth century. Her research focuses primarily on realism and its intersections with the history of science, philosophy, and cultural constructs of gender.

Her current book project traces representations of mirrors and reflection in nineteenth-century paintings and prints, looking to the confluence of mechanical and chemical advances in mirror-making technology with the mirror’s rise to prominence as an artistic motif in the age of realism. She has published extensively on the work of Mary Cassatt, looking particularly to Cassatt’s interest and investment in the question of work, as well as her involvement in the US women’s suffrage movement.

Her research is broadly concerned with the question of women’s labour and its representation in the nineteenth century; in collaboration with Laurel Garber (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Britany Salsbury (Cleveland Museum of Art), she has organized and convened Picturing Women at Work in the Nineteenth Century, a two-day symposium inclusive of topics from across disciplines and the globe. Further research interests include critical archival theory, critical fabulation, and speculative play in art historical methodologies, as well as new curatorial approaches to nineteenth-century art. She has consulted and worked on exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Musée d’Orsay (Paris), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Georgopulos received her PhD in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University and her BA in History and Literature from Reed College. Before coming to UBC, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of French Painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She has held positions at the Morgan Library and Museum and the International Foundation for Art Research, and has taught at Stony Brook University and the City College of New York. In 2019, she was elected to the board of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, for which she currently serves as treasurer. Her research has been supported by grants from Stony Brook University and the Corning Museum of Glass, where she was Scholar-in-Residence in fall 2018.

French art, nineteenth-century art and visual culture, art and science, gender and early feminism

“‘Please Don’t Let Your Ambition Sleep’: Cassatt’s Professionalism,” in Cassatt–McNicoll: Impressionists between Worlds, ed. Caroline Shields, exh. cat., Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2023), 49-67

“‘The Sunflower’s Bloom of Women’s Equality’: New Contexts for Mary Cassatt’s La Femme au tournesol,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8, no. 1 (Spring 2022)

Review: “Hollis Clayson, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Epoque,” caa.reviews (July 2021)

“Rethinking Mary Cassatt’s Reflection as a Self-Portrait,” Print Quarterly 36, no. 4 (December 2019): 425-38