Manon Gaudet

Manon Gaudet studies nineteenth and twentieth-century North American art. Her dissertation examines the role that visual and material culture play in upholding settler colonial logics of possession in the early twentieth-century. Building on foundational scholarship in nineteenth-century American landscape studies, she demonstrates how a range of media reinscribe as artistic strategies various techniques of colonial possession—from survey grids to mineral extraction. In so doing, her work names, in order to disrupt, how settler colonialism is instantiated as a common sense that is maintained as much by art as it is by law.

Prior to Yale, she received an MA in Art History from Carleton University and a BA with Honours from the University of Alberta. She has held internships at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, and has worked with the Carleton University Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale Center for British Art. Her writing has been published in Third Text, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Border Crossings magazine, and featured by the Yale Center for British Art. 

Her research has been supported by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Decorative Arts Trust. She was a 2022-2023 Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.