Anne Higonnet

Art since 1700; Clothing; Collecting; Childhood
Ph.D., Yale University, 1988

Anne Higonnet graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 1980. Since her PhD thesis on the Impressionist Berthe Morisot, she has worked to expand the field of art history. She has authored 5 print books, edited two book-scale online sites, and published many essays on a wide variety of cultural topics.  A book about the style stars of the French Revolution, Liberty, Equality, Fashion, will be published by Norton on April 16.  Essays from the book have appeared in Vogue and Town & Country.

Among her projects have been the visual components of two volumes in the pioneering 1992-95 The History of Women, published world-wide, and participation on the advisory board and in the catalogue of the national French Musée d’Orsay’s Le Modèle Noir, a 2019 exhibition hailed by the European press and called in Artforum “one of the most consequential events to take place in the field of nineteenth-century art in Euro-America in recent decades.”

Higonnet’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Mellon, Social Science Research Council, Howard, and Getty foundations, as well as from the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.

Higonnet speaks frequently to general audiences, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is a prize-winning teacher. Her students hold positions at, among other institutions, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums, the London National Gallery, the Louvre, the Met, the Rijksmuseum, and the University of Virginia. Two of her undergraduate courses are among the most highly enrolled at Barnard or Columbia. One, Clothing, which draws on ten academic fields, will become a national Ed Equity Lab course in spring of 2024.

She is the mother of two children, and lives in both New York City and Connecticut.

A Museum of One's Own; Private Collecting, Public Gift, Periscope Publishing, 2009.

Lewis Carroll (Phaidon, 2008)

"Museum Sight." In Art and its Publics, ed. Andrew McClellan. Blackwell, 2003. 

Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Interplay), Thames & Hudson, 1998.

"Myths of Creation. Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin." In Significant Others. eds. Isabelle de Courtivron & Whitney Chadwick, Thames & Hudson, 1993.

Essays on images. In Vol.s IV and V of The History of Women, eds. Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby, multiple American, European, and Asian editions, 1992-95.

Berthe Morisot's Images of Women. (Harvard University Press, 1992) 

Berthe Morisot. A Biography. (multiple editions 1989-95)