DelPlato, Joan

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Buffalo, B.A., 1975; University of California at Los Angeles, M.A., 1980, Ph.D., 1987.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Bard College at Simon's Rock, 84 Alford Rd., Simon's Rock, Great Barrington, MA 01230. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, educator. Taught at California State University, Long Beach, and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA; Bard College at Simon's Rock, Great Barrington, MA, professor of art history, 1987—. Associate, Five Colleges Women's Studies Research Center, 2001. Chair and speaker at the panel, "Oriental Erotics," College Art Association annual meeting, 2002, and moderator for the panel on Nineteenth-Century French Orientalist Art, at the conference Orientalism: An International Affair, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 2000.

MEMBER:

Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Historians of British Art, Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art, College Art Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Millard Meiss Manuscript Preparation Award, College Art Association, for Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875.

WRITINGS:

Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, NJ), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, Greenwood Press, 1988; Gendered Landscapes, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000; and Visual Literacy, McGraw-Hill, 2001. Contributor to journals, including Afterimage, Gender & Education, and Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joan DelPlato has been a professor of art history at Bard College at Simon's Rock since 1987. She previously taught at California State University, Long Beach, and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA. DelPlato earned her B.A. from the University of Buffalo in 1975, then transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles for her M.A. in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1987. She has written extensively about how British and French art represented the traditional harem found in Muslim countries. Among the books for which DelPlato has contributed articles are Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, 1988, Gendered Landscapes, 2000, and Visual Literacy, 2001. She has also contributed to Afterimage, Gender & Education, and Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

In her book Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875, DelPlato examines 170 nineteenth-century paintings, book illustrations, and prints by such artists as Eugene Delacroix, Edouard Manet, and J.A.D. Ingres. As England and France expanded their empires into Muslim countries, they became more aware of the harems that were common in these areas. The popular imagination was both fascinated with and repulsed by harems. DelPlato's study argues that the West's image of the harem was filtered through a host of religious, cultural, and political concerns that were current in England and France at the time. DelPlato quotes from a number of nineteenth-century texts written by politicians, travellers, artists, and poets to show the range of opinions and speculations that harems inspired in the West. Among those whose writings she examines are John Ruskin, Harriet Martineau, Gerard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, Alphonse de Lamartine, Napoleon Bonaparte, Edward William Lane, and Florence Nightingale. Separate chapters examine the role of Middle Eastern slavery and the concept of the harem—including discussions of the paintings "The Slave Market" by Jean-Leon Gerome and "Bedouin Exchanging a Slave for Armour" or "The Arms Dealer," by John Faed—while other chapters focus on fetishism and "fetishized accoutrements" of the harem. DelPlato presents the harem's "associations, variety, and relation to Western notions of family, slavery, freedom, power, and sex," Kenneth Bendiner wrote in Albion. This range of ideas was also depicted in the paintings of the time. According to Hollis Clayson in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, DelPlato enhances "our understanding of the links between ideas about the Orient and domestic politics and values in both France and Britain." Emily M. Weeks, in her review of the book for Victorian Studies, found that "it is hard to find a text that breaks new ground in the field of imperial studies. Joan DelPlato's Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures, however, is a noteworthy exception." Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures won the Millard Meiss Manuscript Preparation Award from the College Art Association.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albion, winter, 2004, Kenneth Bendiner, review of Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875, p. 675.

Nineteenth-Century French Studies, spring-summer, 2004, Hollis Clayson, review of Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures, p. 362.

Victorian Studies, winter, 2004, Emily M. Weeks, review of Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures, p. 360.

ONLINE

Bard College at Simon's Rock Web site,http://simons-rock.edu/ (May 14, 2008), faculty profile.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harem Symposium Abstracts,http://web.mit.edu/akpia/www/sympharembiosabs.html (May 14, 2008), biography of Joan DelPlato.