Kelly Presutti

Assistant Professor

Goldwin Smith Hall
kmp275@cornell.edu

Education

Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Departments and programs

American Studies Program
History of Art and Visual Studies
Society for the Humanities

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Overview

Kelly Presutti is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, where she teaches courses in modern Western art and the environmental humanities. Research interests include nineteenth-century art and visual culture, landscape, and ecocriticism. Her first book, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France (2024), looks to four landscape typologies—forests, mountains, wetlands and coasts—as sites of negotiation and contestation between state power, local inhabitants, and the environment. A new project studies the art and object collections of the French navy, attending especially to stories of failure, weakness, and defeat to illuminate the surprising role disaster played in the formation of an imperial maritime identity.

Prior to completing her PhD, Presutti held positions at the Getty, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, among other arts organizations. Her work has been supported by Harvard's Center for European Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, a Bourse Chateaubriand from the French Embassy, and fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, UK).

Research Focus

Agglomerations: Accretive Histories of the French Marine, 1827-1914

Agglomerations proposes an object-based history of the intersection between the French navy and art and material culture; the project's title and methodology are based on objects recovered from shipwrecks. Formed from the sedimentation of oceanic particles onto the surface of man-made things, "agglomerations" bring together elements of ship and sea: in one, a precious coin is bound with a dinner fork; others combine pottery shards with mollusk shells. The rough surface of the agglomerations’ calcareous matter contrasts with the gleam of metal or the sheen of ceramic to produce an affective layering of time and space and a material enfolding of ambition and disaster. Agglomerations’ materiality models history as what Édouard Glissant termed an “accumulation of sediments.”

Cutting through the rhetoric of official imperial history, the book's narrative travels to distinct locations where the French were active in the nineteenth century. The navy was a surprising and understudied patron of the arts, which they used to shape the public imaginary in a landlocked capital city. Rather than focusing on overt propaganda, however, the book looks to less straightforward manifestations of maritime identity, places where France’s grasp was less secure—like the site of a shipwreck. The project’s chapters and destinations include New Caledonia, Algeria, South Korea, and French Guiana. Each chapter understands “agglomerations” differently, from the grouping of plants from diverse climates to the uneasy integration of French and Indigenous cartographic practices, as I look to things and people that were brought into otherwise unlikely contact via the navy. The French navy, and consequently the French empire, was not a monolith but instead a shifting entity that comes only uneasily and partially into view. As such, it requires a kind of history that can encompass contradiction, opacity, and obfuscation—an accretive history.

Publications

Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France (Yale University Press, 2024).

“Wood and Stone: Bernard Palissy’s Environmental Legacy,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 59 (2024), 58-72.

“‘A Better Idea than the Best Constructed Charts’: Watercolor Views in Early British Hydrography,” Grey Room 85 (Fall 2021), 70-99.

“The Sèvres’ Service des Départements and the Anxiety of the Fragment,” Word & Image 37, no. 1 (2021), 21-31.

“Transplanting Visions: Barbizon Artists and Louisiana Landscapes,” in Katie Pfohl, ed. Inventing Acadia: Painting and Place in Louisiana (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 59-83.