Bridget Alsdorf

Bridget Alsdorf teaches art history at Princeton, with a focus on European art from the 18th through the early 20th century. She is particularly interested in art’s intersections with literature, philosophy, and social psychology.

She is the author of "Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting" (2012), a study of the fraught dynamic between individual and group in some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, including works by Courbet, Manet, Degas, Bazille, Renoir and (most extensively) Fantin-Latour. A second book, "Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France" (2022), explores how Vallotton, Bonnard, the Lumière brothers, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others represented the seductions and horrors of urban life through the eyes of curious viewers known as "badauds."

Alsdorf has published essays on Cézanne, Gaillard, Hammershøi and Kierkegaard, Manet, Poussin, Tissot, Utrillo, Valadon, Vallotton and Fénéon. She also serves on the editorial board of nonsite.org, where she co-edits a series of issues on 19th-century art.