Meredith Martin will come to speak in the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture on Wednesday, November 18, 2009, on: “Tipu Sultan’s Mission to Versailles: Indomania and Anglomania in Pre-Revolutionary Paris.”

Dr. Martin is currently Assistant Professor of 18th- and 19th-Century European Art at Wellesley College, where she has taught since 2008. She received her B.A. from Princeton and her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She was a lecturer and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University from 2006-2007. In 2004 she held the position of adjunct instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and from 2003-2005, she was a graduate instructor at Harvard University. In addition to the Mellon Fellowship, Professor Martin has received awards and honors including the Chester Dale Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts in 2005-2006, a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Travel Fellowship in 2005, a Harvard University Certificate of Excellence in Teaching in the Spring and Fall of 2002, and the Rensselaer Lee Senior Thesis Prize from Princeton University in 1997.

Dr. Martin has published several articles including: “Interiors and Interiority in the Ornamental Dairy Tradition” (Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, n. 3 (Spring 2008)); “Gilty Pleasures: Meredith Martin on the Rococo” (Artforum, Summer 2008);Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures [with Scott Rothkopf], Serpentine Gallery/Koenig Books, 2007); and “Dairy Queens: Pleasure Dairies from Catherine de Médicis to Marie-Antoinette” (Center 26: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2005-May 2006, (CASVA, 2006)). Her book Dairy Queens: Pastoral Architectural and Political Theater from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette is forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and an anthology entitled Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors, co-edited with Denise Baxter, is forthcoming from Ashgate in 2010.

Professor Martin will give a talk entitled “Tipu Sultan’s Mission to Versailles: Indomania and Anglomania in Pre-Revolutionary Paris.” In 1788 Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore in South India, sent a diplomatic mission to Versailles to meet with King Louis XVI. Tipu hoped to persuade the French to help him fight the British, who were consolidating their power in India. Although Louis XVI turned Tipu down, the French crown did try to strengthen commercial ties with Mysore, especially in the areas of textiles and luxury goods. This talk examines gifts exchanged between France and Mysore and images made of Tipu’s ambassadors during their three-month stay in Paris.

Please join us in the Lecture Hall at the Bard Graduate Center at 5:45pm for a light reception before the talk. Bard Graduate Center is located at 38 West 86th Street, between Columbus Ave and Central Park West.