Alison Syme

My research primarily focuses on art and visual culture of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Britain, France, and the United States. Within this field, I study a range of different topics and traditions, from ephemera to society portraiture to early abstraction. All of my research, however, is characterised by a commitment to close looking; examination of the intersection of art, visual culture, the history of sciences; and analysis of the role of metaphors in artistic practice and poetics. My first book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art (Penn State University Press, 2010), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2011, considers Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynaecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilised ideas of cross-fertilisation and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his works to “naturalise” sexual inversion, visually elaborating a floral poetics of sexual variety. In Willow and a number of articles I have focused primarily on intersections between art and botany, but more recent publications on Berthe Morisot, Edward Burne-Jones, Vanessa Bell, and others have considered the relationships between fin-de-siècle art and geology, atmospheres, and reproductive economies. I am currently working on two book projects. One is a co-edited, multi-volume set of primary sources on the Victorian artist. The second, Burne-Jones and the Book, explores the Victorian artist’s poetics of materials and animation strategies in the context of Victorian science and print culture. Other current research interests include the Omega Workshops, late 19th-century animal painting, and practices of copying.

My graduate courses include “Art and Animation,” “Bloomsbury and Vorticism,” and “Modern Craft."
 

Selected Publications

• “Healthcare Intimacies: Vanessa Bell and Dr Marie Moralt,” in Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. Fiona Johnstone, Allison Morehead, and Imogen Wiltshire (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), 223–37. 
• “Dog Art and Chick Pics,” Cusp: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Cultures 1 (2022): 116–131. 
• “Omega Flowers and Bloomsbury Modernism,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 29.2 (Fall-Winter 2022): 193–231. 
• “Morisot’s Urbane Ecologies,” in A Companion to Impressionism, ed. André Dombrowski, 375–392 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2021) (7,200 words)
• “‘All that is solid melts into air’: Burne-Jones, Glaciation, and the Matter of History,” in Victorian Science and Imagery: The Evolution of Form in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, ed. Nancy Marshall, 56–78, 244–252 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) 
• “The Media of Sight: Burne-Jones and the Graiae,” Victorian Studies 62.2 (Winter 2020): 253–267. 
• “Pressed Flowers: Burne-Jones, the Romaunt of the Rose, and the Kelmscott Chaucer,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 28 (Fall 2019): 42–69. (10,500 words)
• With Susan Ashbrook, “Beautifying Books and Popularizing Posters in Europe and America, 1855–1895,” in The History of Illustration, ed. Susan Doyle, Jaleen Grove, and Whitney Sherman (New York: Fairchild Books, 2018), 232–247.  
• “Bohemians of the Vegetable World,” in Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Re-Thinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, ed. Jongwoo Kim and Christopher Reed, 10–23 (New York: Routledge, 2017)
• “Screens of Vegetation; or, The Cyber Gardens of Philomène Longpré,” in Philomène Longpré: Transcendare. Ouvres-Systèmes Sensibles/Responsive Art Systems, ed. Christine Redfern (Montreal: Ellephant, 2016), 39–59.
• “Über Geschichten von pflanzlichen Vampiren – oder moderne Verbrauchernachrichten” (“Tales of Vegetable Vampires; or, Modern Consumer Reports”), trans. Daniel Schreiber, in Floriographie: Die Sprachen der Blumen, ed. Isabel Kranz, Alexander Schwann, and Eike Wittrock (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2016), 315–335.
• Willow (Reaktion, 2014)
• A Touch of Blossom (Penn State UP, 2010)