Christina Smylitopoulos

Description

Dr Christina Smylitopoulos is Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Fine Art and Music. She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art and the Faculty Curator for the Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection (https://www.uoguelph.ca/arts/bachinski-chu). Before joining the faculty at the University of Guelph, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art in the Exhibitions and Publications division. She earned her PhD from McGill University where she was awarded the Arts Insights award for the best dissertation in the humanities and holds an MA from the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York (United Kingdom). She was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow and a Paul Mellon Centre for British Art Junior Fellow and has received research grants from, among others, the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Science; SSHRC (Connection/IDG); the Lewis Walpole Library (Yale); the Huntington Library; the Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon (Library of Congress, Washington DC); and the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Dr Smylitopoulos' recent publications can be found in L'Image Railleuse: La satire visuelle du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (eds. Laurent Baridon, Frédérique Desbuissons, and Dominic Hardy; https://books.openedition.org/inha/8473), Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature (eds. Lauren Beck and Christina Ionescu, Delaware, 2017); Hats Off, Gentlemen: Changing Arts of Communication in the Eighteenth Century (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur series Lumières internationales); Revue d'art canadienne/Canadian Art Review (RACAR); The British Art Journal; Eighteenth-Century Life; and Word and Image in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue and she has edited two collections of essays--Agents of Space: Eighteenth-Century Art, Architecture and Visual Culture (2016); Artful Encounters: Sites of Visual Inquiry (2021)--and co-edited with Dr Christina Ionescu "Wonder in the Eighteenth Century," a special issue of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies journal Lumen (XXXIX/2020). She also edited the exhibition catalogue, Spaces of Wonder, Wonder of Space: Encountering the Eighteenth Century Through Image, Object, and Text, which was named a winner of the Katharine Kyes Leab & Daniel J. Leab Exhibition Award (Division Three, 2019).

Dr Smylitopoulos was a recipient of the 2019 UGFA Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2014 College of Arts Teaching Excellence Award. Her general teaching interests fall within the latter half of the early modern period, roughly from the mid-seventeenth century to the end of what is commonly referred to as the ‘long eighteenth century’ (the 1830s). This period encompasses the European Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, as well as the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic periods. Stylistically she considers late Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, and Romanticism as well as the approaches to art production which may complicate or defy stylistic categorizations. She also supervises graduate students in the MA in Art History and Visual Culture (https://www.uoguelph.ca/arts/sofam/ma-arthistory) and a range of undergraduate and graduate experiential learning opportunities.