Staff Profiles

Areas of Expertise

Biogenetics, evolutionism and eugenics; art institutional histories (France); art history’s histories; dialogues between the arrière-garde and avant-garde; art, cultural colonization; Modernist visual cultures and Poststructuralist theories.

Teaching Areas

Breeding the Body Beautiful: Art and Biogenetics; The ‘Civilizing Mission’: Modern Art and French Imperialism; Decadents, Dissidents and Degenerates: Irrational Modernism and its Critics; Eurocentred Visions: Grand Narratives in Western Art; Queering the Canon: Theories of Art, History and Culture; Modernism and the Experience of Modernity; The Postmodern Condition; East/West: The Great Divide in German Art and Politics.

Current Research Activity

Fay Brauer's three present projects focus upon the body. Histories of art, popular culture, medicine, science and sport are deployed in Regenerating the Body: Modernism, Evolutionism and Eugenics to reveal how a re-conceptualisation and re-imaging of the human body occurred in Western art and culture, from the end of the nineteenth century, through fitness becoming a Darwinian, Lamarckian and Mendelian imperative. By demonstrating how regeneration facilitated the normalisation and "subjectification" of the body for procreative sexuality, technologised industry and modern warfare, this book substantially revises Michel Foucault's "biopolitical" theories. In identifying how beauty became inscribed upon the regenerated body and abjection upon the degenerate "other", it reveals that the quest for biogenetics emerged long before it became a reality in Nazi Germany.

Drawing upon histories of circus, vaudeville and variety theatre performers, Feminizing Muscle: Body Trouble and Visual Cultures reveals that women's bodybuilding has a history that extends back into the nineteenth century. While these women had the potential to redefine femininity and female beauty, this exploration of how they were represented in visual cultures reveals that they were constantly subjected to strategies of degenderization or feminine recuperation.

On 1 January 1934, when the Third Reich Eugenic Sterilisation Law was applied, the Third Reich not just commended the eugenic policies fostered in America and Britain, but acknowledged them as their precedent. Through an examination of painting, sculpture, prints, posters, photography, film and video, the ways in which different concepts of the body and genetic theories crossed national boundaries and circulated through different cultures is explored in Crossing Body Cultures: Art, Eugenics and Biogenetics from the emergence of Galtonian eugenics to Bioart today.

Publications

Books

Brauer, F. , (awaiting publication) , Modern Art’s Centre: The French State, the Paris Salons and the ‘Civilizing Mission’ , , Yale University Press .

Brauer, F. , (awaiting publication) , Building the Body Beautiful: Modern Art, Popular Culture and the ‘Fitness Imperative’ , , The MIT Press .

Brauer, F. , (awaiting publication) , Corpus Delecti: Art, Sex and Eugenics , , Ashgate Publishing Limited .

Book Chapters

Brauer, F. (2006). Rationalizing Eros: "The Plague of Onan", the Procreative Imperative and Duchamp's Sexual Automatons . Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism. ( - ). Cambridge , Cambridge Scholars Press.

Brauer, F. (2006). La Rationalisation d’Eros : La procréation rationelle et les automates sexuels de Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp et érotisme. ( - ). Paris, Presse Universitaire de Nancy.

Brauer, F. (2006). Le duo dangereux: "L’homme normal" et le corps dégénéré au temps de eugénisme. Représentations du corps : normes et normalité; le biologique et le vécu. ( - ). Paris, Presse Universitaire de Nancy.

Brauer, F. (2006). Dégénéréscence . Dictionnaire du corps. ( - ). Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

Brauer, F. (2006). Biopouvoir. Dictionnaire du corps. ( - ). Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

Brauer, F. (2006). Bodybuilding . Dictionnaire du corps. ( - ). Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

Brauer, F. (2005). Dangerous Doubles: Degenerate and Regenerate Body Photography in the Eugenic Imagination; Les doubles dangereux: La photographie du corps dégénéré et du corps régénéré. Image and Imagination. (91 - 102). Montréal, McGill-Queen's University Press Montréal.

Brauer, F. (2002). Commercial Spies & Cultural Invaders: The French Press, Pénétration Pacifique and Xenophobic Nationalism in the Shadow of War. Printed Matters: Printing, Publishing and Urban Culture in Europe in the Modern Period. (105 - 132). Paris, Commercial Spies & Cultural Invaders: The French Press, Pénétration Pacifique and Xenophobic Nationalism in the Shadow of WarCommercial Spies & Cultural Invaders: The French Press, Pénétration Pacifique and Xenophobic Nationalism in the Shadow of War.

Refereed Journal Articles

Brauer, F. (2005). Flaunting Manliness: Republican Masculinity, Virilized Homosexuality and the Desirable Male Body, in Masculinities. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, (6:1). (23 - 42).

Brauer, F. (2004). Eradicating Difference: The Bioethics of Imaging ‘Degeneracy’ and Exhibiting Eugenics. The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, (1). (139 - 166).

Brauer, F. (2003). Representing ‘Le Moteur Humain’: Chronometry, Chronophotography, ‘The Art of Work’ and the ‘Taylored Body’. Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, (XIX: 2). (83 - 106).

Brauer, F. (2003). The Darwin/ist of Art History. Art History, (26:4). (592 - 598).

Brauer, F. (2002). Writing French Art Histories of Dissension in the Shadow of Vichy. Art History, (25:2, July). (398 - 405).

Brauer, F. (2001). Hegelian History, Wölfflinean Periodization and ‘Smithesque Modernism’. Art History, (24:2, July). (449 - 456).

Brauer, F. (1994-1995). “An Horizon is both pictorial and strategic”: The Geopolitics of Land and Landscape, in Colonizing the Country. Australian Journal of Art, (XII). (9 - 14).

Published Articles

Brauer, F. (). Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français: Official Art at the Time of Cubism. L’Histoire de l’Art, (). ( - ).

Brauer, F. (). The Daughter’s Seduction: Paedophilic Eroticism at the Official Salons. Journal of Visual Culture, (). ( - ).

Brauer, F. (). Hystericizing the Male Body: Charcot, Miss Urania and the Homoerotic Art of Gustave Courtois. Journal of Cultural Difference, (). ( - ).

Brauer, F. (). Feminizing Muscle: Body Trouble in Visual Cultures. Journal of Cultural Difference, (). ( - ).

Brauer, F. (1993). The Ecstasy of the Open Text : The Exquisite Mechanism of Shivers in Binocular. FOCUSING - MATERIAL - HISTORIES, (). (67 - 80).

Grants

Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, Regenerating the Body: Modernism, Evolutionism and Eugenics. (2004-2006),

Special Studies Programme, The Harry Ranson Humanities Research Centre and Visiting Scholar, The University of Texas at Austin. (2005),

Australian Research Council LIEF Grant, Dictionary of Australian Artists. (2005),

Australian Research Council Large Grant, Modern Art’s Centre: The French State, the Paris Salons and the ‘Civilizing Mission’. (2002-2003),

John Yu Fellowship, International Research and Exchange, Université de Paris, Sorbonne. (2002),

Professional Associations

The Art Book, Association of Art Historians’ and Blackwell Publishing
Advisory Board

«Corps. Revue interdisciplinaire», CNRS, Marseille
Comitè de redaction

Wellcome Institute for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London

Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine, Université de Paris, Sorbonne

Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Bibliothèque nationale de France

Society for Science, Literature and Art (SLSA), U.S.A.

Australian and New Zealand Art Association (AANZ), Australia and New Zealand

College Art Association (CAA), U.S.A.