Michelle Foa, Ph.D., joined the faculty of Tulane University’s Department of Art in 2008. As an associate professor of art history, her work centers on French art and the visual and material culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision (Yale University Press, 2015), situates Seurat’s body of work as a sustained investigation into various forms of visual and mental engagement with the external world. In particular, she explores Seurat’s interest in the relationship between vision and knowledge, interpreting his work in connection with 19th-century scientific debates about sensory perception and its role in understanding our environment.
Foa is currently working on a second book, this time on Edgar Degas, which examines the artist’s ongoing experimentation with diverse modes of picture- and object-making within the broader context of discourses on matter and materiality in late 19th-century France. Her additional research interests include the materials of art, Europe’s global encounters in the 18th and 19th centuries, the intersection of art, science, and technology, and the history and methodology of art historiography and criticism.
She served as the lead faculty member for the 360-degree course “Environmental Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” which she co-designed and co-taught with faculty from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Architecture, and Sociology. The course, which counts as an elective for the SISE minor, was made possible through a major grant from the Carol Lavin Bernick Family Foundation. Foa also recently taught an interdisciplinary course titled “The Meaning of Materials,” for which she received both a Lavin Bernick Grant and a William L. Duren ’26 Professorship.
As a Social Entrepreneurship Professor, Foa worked to build stronger connections between the Taylor Center and the arts at Tulane. She continues to engage students in examining how works of art reflect and respond to the pressing social and environmental challenges of their time.
Foa earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2008. She has previously taught at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton.
Foa currently holds the Carnegie Corporation of New York Professorship of Social Entrepreneurship from 2019 to 2025.