DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Thadeus Dowad specializes in the art and architectural history of the Ottoman and French empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is particularly interested in the history of French imperialism in the Ottoman Middle East and North Africa, examining the impacts of capitalism, slavery, revolutionary politics, and empire-building on metropolitan and colonial artistic cultures across the Franco-Ottoman world. Drawing on scholarship in comparative literature, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, his research and teaching explore transregional art histories that foreground processes of exchange, encounter, translation, and inter-imperial competition. Other areas of research and teaching include: global histories of portraiture; the art and architecture of (post-)Revolutionary France; European and Ottoman Orientalisms; Ottoman photography; the history of turquerie; and queerness in Islamic art.

His current book project, tentatively titled Empire of Line & Pigment: Art, Ottomans, and the French Occupation of Egypt, is the first comprehensive art and architectural history of the 1798–1801 French occupation of Egypt. Bringing together French, Ottoman, and Arabic archives, the book explores the entangled roles of French Revolutionary artists and Ottoman-Egyptian colonized actors in building France’s first colonial possession in the Ottoman Empire. The study examines a wide range of French and Ottoman visual and material culture produced in occupied Egypt, including calligraphy, portrait painting, typography and print, architecture, and scientific drawing.

Before receiving his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2022, he completed his M.A. in the History of Art from Williams College and his B.A. in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a visiting graduate student in the History Department at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. His research and language training have been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris.