Dissertation

Morisot Rêveuse

Advisor

Professor Leo Costello

James McCabe is a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on gender, colonialism, and nationalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art. His dissertation, Morisot Rêveuse, examines French Impressionist Berthe Morisot’s later artworks to piece together the relationship between the bourgeois interiors of the metropole and the French periphery. James co-organized the Department of Art History and Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality graduate student conference, “Where are our women artists?: Linda Nochlin’s Question in the Age of Feminist Visual Culture” with fellow graduate student Lauren Lovings-Gomez. During Summer 2024, he participated at the Harvard Art Museums’ Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA). While at Rice University, he co-taught the course “Manet(s)/Modernism(s)” with his advisor, Dr. Leo Costello. For the academic year 2025-26, he is a Part-Time Visiting Lecturer at Holy Cross and a Part-Time Instructor at Westfield State University. Before attending Rice, he received a BA in Art with a concentration in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2015 and an MA in Art History from Tufts University in 2018.