Brynne McBryde

Brynne McBryde specializes in art and visual culture from the long nineteenth century with an emphasis on the legacies of Enlightenment thinking in representations of the human body. Her current book project, Embodied Medical Mythologies: Nineteenth-century bodies, medical imagery, and the construction of biological identity, examines the role of French medical illustrations and the modes of looking they create in transforming experiential categories of identity (such as gender, sexuality, and race) into inescapable and visible physiology. The book traces the visual conventions and rhetorics of objectivity, difference, and illness from illustrations in medical textbooks, through anthropological and pornographic images, to more traditional subjects of art historical inquiry, such as photographs and oil paintings, and finally to the modes of self-presentation adopted by pathologized individuals who adopt and exploit imposed biological categories. It therefore brings together a wide range of genres, mediums, and creators to explore a shared understanding of the body as representative of human identity. Her work draws on methods and insights from art history, the history of medicine and science, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

She has taught a variety of courses on eighteenth- through twenty-first century art at institutions including the Pennsylvania State University and the University of North Carolina Greensboro and is currently a Collegiate Fellow in the University of Maryland’s multidisciplinary University Honors program. Her work has appeared in Art History and has been supported by a Junior Fellowship with the Turin Humanities Programme.