Allison Deutsch

Allison Deutsch is Departmental Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Oxford, Lifelong Learning. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century art, its sexual politics, and its colonial contexts. She completed her BA in Art History at Williams College and earned her PhD from University College London. She has previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. She has also taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

Deutsch’s first book, Consuming Painting: Food and the Feminine in Impressionist Paris, was published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2021. It examines the culinary metaphors employed by nineteenth-century art critics to describe modern-life painting in deeply gendered terms and reveals the visceral reactions that these paintings provoked. Her current research project addresses a colonial imaginary through which many nineteenth-century writers expressed anxiety about French impressionism. Deutsch also publishes in the areas of French art, literature, and the Paris Commune; the multi-sensory reception of art; and the sexual politics of paintings of food and dining. Her work has appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and Dix-Neuf.