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Former Visiting Research Fellow 2022-23
Natasha Ruiz-Gómez is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex. She specialises in French art and visual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is especially interested in the intersection of art and medicine. She has published widely on the work of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Her interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in Art History, Medical Humanities, Modern and Contemporary France, Forensic Science International: Mind and Law, Thresholds and various anthologies, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen) and the Tate. She has also published in The Conversation and Wellcome Collection Stories.
Natasha has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, a five-year Research Councils UK Fellowship and a Kress Curatorial Fellowship at the Brooklyn Museum. She is currently a member of the Higher Education Committee for the Association for Art History and the Editorial Board of caa.reviews, as well as serving as Field Editor for Nineteenth-Century Books for caa.reviews.
Natasha recently completed a book manuscript that examines the ‘scientific artworks’ of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) and the Salpetriere School, with particular attention to the work of Dr Paul Richer (1849-1933). Charcot became one of the founders of modern neurology by studying the patients of the living pathological museum, as he called it, of the Hopital de la Salpetriere in Paris, where he was head of the medical service for more than thirty years. In their drawings, photographs and sculptures, the doctors of the Salpetriere School demonstrated a clear engagement with contemporary artistic practices and discourses, all the while protesting their own objectivity. Natasha's book, The Scientific Artworks of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot and the Salpêtrière School: Pathology and Visual Culture in fin-de-siècle France, questions the elasticity of the concept of objectivity, avowed by the doctors at the Salpetriere even as they employed artistic skill, and thereby subjective interpretation, to visualise pathology. The book will be published by Penn State University Press in spring 2024.
During her Visiting Research Fellowship, she was working on two projects. The first is a book manuscript that looks at the fundamental importance of 'reproducibility' in all aspects of Auguste Rodin's practice, including sculpture, drawing and photography. It counters the narrative that Rodin was nature's 'sublime copyist', which the artist himself propagated and which continues in much of the Rodin scholarship. Its working title is 'Against Nature: Rodin and Reproducibility'.
The second project—and the one she was working on at the Institute of Advanced Studies—is on 'Global Bodies'. She, Keren Hammerschlag (Australian National University) and Tania Cleaves (née Woloshyn, independent scholar) collaborated on an edited collection that prioritises critical cross-disciplinary and transnational analyses of different objects and images from a range of geographies that engage with the themes of human bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; typologies of the body; and the human body with and without borders. In addition to co-writing the introduction, Natasha was writing and revising her contribution to the volume, which examines two texts on male and female ‘artistic anatomy’ by Paul Richer, written between 1890 and 1920. Begun during his time at the Salpêtrière and completed while Professor of Anatomy at the École des beaux-arts, Richer’s multi-volume series on anatomy purports to objectively represent and analyse the human body, utilising drawings, chronophotographs, an updated canon of proportions and so on. While his first book on male anatomy (Anatomie artistique, 1890) presents a singular, idealised male body, the one on female anatomy (Nouvelle Anatomie Artistique du corps humain. II: Cours supérieur. Morphologie: La Femme, 1920) puts forth the multiplicity—and seeming unknowability—of the female body.
