Sarah Rapoport

Sarah Rapoport studies nineteenth-century French and British art with a focus on artistic and cultural exchange across the Channel. Her dissertation reimagines the convergence of art, craft, and industry in the later nineteenth century. Tracing the intertwined politics of artistic and craft making in an age of international expositions and transmanche design reform, the project considers how both conceptions and practices of industrial and machine production shaped aesthetic developments and discourses across mediums. Her paper on industry and national identity in James Tissot’s cloisonné enamels, drawn from her dissertation, was awarded the 2025 Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation Prize by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art. 

 

Sarah holds an A. B. in Art & Archaeology with Highest Honors from Princeton University, where her thesis on James Tissot and ‘vulgarity’ received the Stella and Rensselaer W. Lee Prize. Her research has been supported by the Decorative Arts Trust, the MacMillan Center’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the History of Art Department. She has worked in curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. In 2022-23, she returned to the Museum of Modern Art as the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in Drawings at Prints, where she assisted with a Käthe Kollwitz retrospective and authored a catalogue essay on the artist’s influence on the visual culture of the American Left. Other current research projects address the relationship between ‘vulgarity’, detail, and artistic labor in Victorian art criticism and Edgar Degas’s engagement with English cartoons.