André Dombrowski

On leave 2026-27

André Dombrowski is the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th Century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 2008. His research and teaching center on the arts and material cultures of France and Germany from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. He is particularly concerned with the social and intellectual rationales behind the emergence of avant-garde painting in the 1860s to 1890s, including Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, he places the development of modern art firmly within the histories of technology, science, politics, sexuality, and psychology. He has written books and articles on such crucial artists of the period as Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Adolf von Menzel, to name but a few. He has also published on the political imagery surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, and has an interest in the material culture of the period stretching from Second Empire decorative arts, like 1860s photosculpture, to art nouveau and Jugendstil around 1900. With his partner, the art historian Jonathan Katz, he has co-authored several new readings of queer desire embedded within some of the most familiar Impressionist paintings by Frédéric Bazille and Gustave Caillebotte, and has a broad interest in modern queer art.

Prof. Dombrowski is the author of two books. His Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (University of California Press, 2013) is winner of the Phillips Book Prize from the Center for the Study of Modern Art at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC. The book analyzes Cézanne’s early scenes of murder and sexual violence through the lens of pre-Freudian definitions of desire and instinct. In 2023, he published Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time (Yale University Press), a book that studies the fraught relationship between the impressionist instant and the histories of modern timekeeping. Chapters focus, for instance, on reaction time and the birth of Impressionism; Impressionism’s now time and labor time; the advent of legal and universal timeframes in the 1870s and 1880s and their effect on the serried order of Monet’s later work, among other period constructions of temporality.

Prof. Dombrowski is currently at work on two new book projects. The first is a shorter book, again focused on Monet and Cézanne, that centers the ways their paintings dissolved pictorial boundaries, turning what was once an outline into an atmospheric zone of painterly exuberance called envelope, crust, or contour. The second is a larger study that will situate the formal innovations and academic rule-breaking of Édouard Manet’s major 1860s paintings within the Second Empire’s legal and juridical cultures, asking at what points the breaking of artistic protocol, for which Manet is so famous, intersected with the breaking of the law.

Besides those books, Prof. Dombrowski is the editor of the 2021 Wiley Blackwell Companion to Impressionism, which includes about thirty new contributions from the major scholars in the field, who place this crucial modernist movement in a global context. He has co-edited, with Hollis Clayson, the volume Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Routledge, 2016) and with Nancy Ireson and Sylvie Patrie, Cézanne in the Barnes Foundation (Rizzoli Electa, 2021). With his students and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, he has edited exhibition catalogs on the modern image culture of the Dreyfus Affair; world’s fair material culture; and Courbet’s landscapes. Furthermore, he has an interest in the global and imperial dimensions of the field of Impressionist Studies and has co-organized several conferences, including an event in St. Petersburg in 2010 called Russia and the Global Cézanne Effect and another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2019. Prof. Dombrowski has also published on art and globalization in the period.

Prof. Dombrowski joined the history of art faculty at Penn in 2008, after receiving his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2006, and holds an M.A. from the University of Hamburg and another from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. He taught at Smith College from 2005 to 2008. First a predoctoral and, in 2020-21, a senior fellow at The Center at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, a DAAD fellow, and a recipient of a two-year fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in Düsseldorf, Prof. Dombrowski also held a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2008-09 and membership in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for 2012-13. At the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Dombrowski has served as interim department chair and undergraduate chair in History of Art, as the chair of the advisory committee to Penn’s Arthur Ross Gallery and has convened the LGBTQA+ faculty diversity working group. He is also a core faculty member of the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program and has a secondary appointment in the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies.