DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Alicia Caticha (Ph.D., University of Virginia) specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European sculpture and decorative arts with a particular focus on issues of materiality, colonialism, and popular culture.

Caticha’s book project, “Sculpting Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century France: Sugar, Porcelain, Marble,” traces the inordinate amount of artistic and scientific energy that was expended on the whitening of sugar sculptures, porcelain figurines, and marble statuettes in eighteenth-century France. Scientists, merchants, porcelainiers, sugar refiners, and land surveyors all attempted to transform the raw materials of sugar cane, clay, and quarried stone into paragons of whiteness that could find credence and value within European moral and aesthetic codes. In doing so, “Sculpting Whiteness” illustrates how the construction of whiteness across materials marked a concerted attempt to reify associations between sculpture, purity, and an emerging notion of racialized whiteness amidst the continual threat of colonial loss and the diminution of French power in the last decades of the Ancien Régime. Her research has been published in Art History, Journal18, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction and has been supported by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the 24-month Chester Dale Fellowship from the Center for the Advanced Studies of the Visual Arts, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Newberry Library.

Caticha is an active member of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA), the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), and is on the organizing committee of the Newberry Library’s Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar. At Northwestern, she is a Faculty Fellow of Hobart House, Northwestern’s Women and Non-Binary Residential College.

Other research and teaching interests include the relationship between popular culture (including Beyoncé), fashion, and art history from the eighteenth-century to the present day. Recent courses include: “Marie Antoinette: Art and Legacy,” “Eighteenth-Century Art: the Rococo,” “Empires of Fashion: from Marie Antoinette to Meghan Markle,” “Paris: Fashion Capitols of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries?” and “Marble,” which takes up the role of marble in the Western cultural consciousness from Antiquity to the present.

Program Area: 18th and 19th Century, Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Regional Specialization: Europe, with a focus on France and the French Caribbean

Selected Publications

Alicia Caticha, “Sugarcoating Slavery: Enslaved Confectioners in Saint-Domingue,” Colonial Networks (March 2026). 

Alicia Caticha, “Material Masquerade: Porcelain, Sugar, and Race on the Eighteenth-Century French Dining Table,” Art History 47, no. 3 (2024), 572-598.

Alicia Caticha, “Some Thoughts on Fashion and Race in the Classroom; or, TikTok, Cottagecore, and the Allure of Eighteenth-Century Empire Style Dress,” Journal18, 13 (2022).

Alicia Caticha, “Sculpture and Porcelain Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” French Porcelain Society Journal VIII (2020), 139-161.

Alicia Caticha, “Madame Récamier as Tableau Vivant: Marble and the Classical Ideal in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Apesh*t,” Journal18 (2020).

Alicia Caticha, ‘Neither Poets, Painters, nor Sculptors’: Classical Mimesis and the Art of Female Hairdressing in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 31, no. 2 (2018-19), 413-438.