DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Thadeus Dowad is the Crown Junior Chair in Middle East Studies and Assistant Professor of Art History. He is also a core faculty member in Northwestern’s Middle East & North African (MENA) Studies Program.

Thadeus specializes in the art and architectural history of the Ottoman and French empires in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a focus on the arts of painting, drawing, photography, and architecture. 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. His research draws on scholarship in comparative literature, queer theory, and postcolonial studies to explore transregional art histories that foreground processes of exchange, encounter, translation, and inter-imperial competition. Other areas of research and teaching include: the art and architecture of (post-)Revolutionary France; European and Ottoman Orientalisms; Ottoman photography; the history of [ital.]turquerie[/ital.]; and queerness in MENA art.

His current book project, [ital.]The Draftsmen’s Empire: Art & the French Occupation of Egypt[/ital.], offers the first in-depth study of draftsmanship as an apparatus of colonialism during the 1798–1801 French occupation of Egypt. Bringing together a wide range of drawings produced in occupied Egypt, from archaeological and scientific drawings to portraits, urban landscapes, and calligraphy, alongside Ottoman and Arabic archives, the book explores the entangled roles of French Revolutionary artists and Egyptian colonized actors in building France’s first colonial possession in the Ottoman Empire. It offers a revisionist history of French Revolutionary art by foregrounding its colonial applications and highlighting the active role of individual Egyptians in shaping the theories and practices of draftsmanship in the final years of the Republic.

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 has been supported by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern, the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), The Center at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris.